Hello, economist here! You are half correct. It's not a science, it is a social science. As far as methods go, it's quite imperialistic and has been the source of a lot of methodology improvements in many fields over the last several decades (especially in mechanism design and econometrics, IMHO).
Though, there are certainly ideological branches of economics. A good example is the "Austrian school," which claims to be the "mainline" of economics instead of mainstream per Pete Boettke.[0] There are also pretty dead arguments around Institutional Economics and similar that aren't really active fields anymore. However, this notion that standard economics is somehow lost is more reactionary and prosaic than it is sublime -- mainstream economics tends to do quite well in the marketplace of ideas and in evaluation, though subject to the same replication concerns all social sciences face.
Recent work in causal inference (which ML enthusiasts celebrate) has absolutely upped the bar for economists' output.
As for your hunches, they aren't really on point or based in reality. Modern Monetary Theory came a long time after Baumol's elucidation of sectoral cost disease. Recall that macroeconomic theory is only a small part of economics as a whole, even when considering its associated fields of inquiry.
Academia is fraught with fraud... Once the establishment has settled on a narrative regarding some subject, professors will be falling over themselves to present studies based on Cherry picked data that will support the establishment narrative.. very few studies are actually reproducible..
Hello, economist here! You are half correct. It's not a science, it is a social science. As far as methods go, it's quite imperialistic and has been the source of a lot of methodology improvements in many fields over the last several decades (especially in mechanism design and econometrics, IMHO).
Though, there are certainly ideological branches of economics. A good example is the "Austrian school," which claims to be the "mainline" of economics instead of mainstream per Pete Boettke.[0] There are also pretty dead arguments around Institutional Economics and similar that aren't really active fields anymore. However, this notion that standard economics is somehow lost is more reactionary and prosaic than it is sublime -- mainstream economics tends to do quite well in the marketplace of ideas and in evaluation, though subject to the same replication concerns all social sciences face.
Recent work in causal inference (which ML enthusiasts celebrate) has absolutely upped the bar for economists' output.
As for your hunches, they aren't really on point or based in reality. Modern Monetary Theory came a long time after Baumol's elucidation of sectoral cost disease. Recall that macroeconomic theory is only a small part of economics as a whole, even when considering its associated fields of inquiry.
[0] https://www.peter-boettke.com/mainline-economics