Actually, no.
We are pretty good at enforcing analytical standards--or, depending on how you look at it, thought-policing our discipline--*within*economics*departments*. An argument like Karl Marx's in _Wage Labor and Capital_ (with its confusion between the capital-labor ratio in physical terms and the capital-labor ratio in value added terms), or like Friedrich Hayek's in _Prices and Production_ (with its assertion that the only thing that can bring on a recession is a previous episode of inflation and unwarranted speculation), or like Arthur Laffer's (with its assertion that liberal governments always push spending up to or beyond the top of the Laffer curve), or like Harley Shaiken's (with its assertion that more than half of American mass production employment will flow to Mexico in the decade after NAFTA), or like Charles Murray's in _The Bell Curve_ (with its assertion that genes account for "most" large differences in socio-economic status) simply gets laughed at whether at Chicago, M.I.T., or Berkeley.
Elsewhere in the university, however--in public policy schools, in business schools, at public policy research centers--arguments that don't pass our analytical standards flourish.
And in the great public debate economists' mind share is surprisingly low. There are always powerful interests eager to have people who will claim to be an "economist" on their side, and they are willing to pay: as a result you have tobacco economists claiming that cigarette smoking imposes no net costs on the government, supply-siders claiming that any tax cuts will increase total revenue collected, protectionists claiming that the public interest requires making cheap clothing perhaps half again as expensive as it would otherwise be, strategic traders, and a host of others. Industrial fractions with extremely strong material interests are willing to pay high, and you can always find someone amoral enough to take their money and say the appropriate lines--or someone too dumb to realize that their arguments are wrong, or someone too weak-willed to face up to the cognitive dissonance created by the fact that what would be convenient for the people who write their salary checks just isn't true...
Brad DeLong