Not really. Climate science is actually a decent analogy. We look at the historical record (observational, can't do experiments, very macro) and combine it with

Not really. Climate science is actually a decent analogy. We look at the historical record (observational, can't do experiments, very macro) and combine it with theory we can back up from foundations and experiments (done on a micro level) and get an overall picture of how things work. Just as we don't need to recreate the entire planet's history in a lab, we don't need to recreate the global economy. I chose the 'large earthquake' example deliberately. We can't do experiments on the level of large-scale earthquakes, it's very hard and pretty inaccurate, but we can still do quite a bit of real science. And it turns out that physics is more than just earthquakes, just as econ is more than macro. This isn't to say that macroeconomics is spot on or even good, but just to say the challenges around experimentation aren't fundamental barriers to scientific understanding.