[WS:] This whole drama is symptomatic of a much larger issue - the role of the academia and the commentariat class in the provision of needed conclusions to those in a position to pay for them. Economics and political sciences more generally are not sciences in any meaningful sense of the word. Science is about observing and explaining empirical patterns - and this requires a sufficient number of observations of the fundamentally similar phenomena to rule out possible explanations. In other words, science deals with situations when there is far more observations (cases) than variables explaining regularities among them.
The so-called political "sciences" face the opposite situation - they deal with a very few observations, sometimes even with a singular occurrence, but the number of possible explanations of the outcomes (variables) is far greater than the number of cases on which these explanations can be tested.
This makes any scientific testing impossible, because they is not enough observations to rule out alternative hypotheses.
So at best, economics, political science, policy analysis etc. are high brow journalism - interesting (or not so interesting) stories, narratives describing singular events that are fundamentally an outcome of chance i.e. combinations of many circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated. This however, doe not stop the so called "experts" from selling their stories as "science". And the main reason why they are so successful at selling this rubbish is that there his high demand for it.
This demand goes way beyond the usual bamboozling the public that is an ordinary part of political speech. People have a cognitive need for closure, which means that they have the need to understand 'what is going on" around them. An if they do not have the capacity to provide that explanation by science and technology, they turn out to mythology.
Bronislaw Malinowski demonstrated that quite convincingly in his anthropological studies of Trobriand islanders. The only difference between Trobriand islander magic rites and modern economics, political science, policy analysis, etc. is that the latter have appearances of formal rationality used in the scientific method.
This is where the so-called "policy experts" come in. These individuals are good at listening to the talk of power players, picking up themes and buzzwords that are currently in vogue, and then translating these themes and buzzwords into scientifically looking "theories" - usually by the use of incomprehensible jargon and mathematics. Since the main role of these "theories" is to provide assurances and sense of closure to the powers that be, it matters little that they either cannot be tested or are proved to be patently wrong. In the same vein, events depicted in a novel or film doe not have to be true or even very plausible (albeit some plausibility is necessary to establish their relevance to the lives of the readers) - all they have to do is to evoke good feeling in the readers, affirm their convictions, beliefs and views of the world, and assure them of their place in that world.
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-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."