There are shades of grey here. In an absolute sense Newtonian mechanics worked until the systems of measurement got good enough to show that there were problems

There are shades of grey here. In an absolute sense Newtonian mechanics worked until the systems of measurement got good enough to show that there were problems. Economics seems to be in quite a different situation - it's been shown not to work at all. Economists seem to have very little predictive capability, they predict poorly, measure things that matter little and deliver interventions that alter the wrong things. An alternative doesn't have a high bar to jump.