Economists in the public sphere are a fraction of practising economists and are often bought and paid for to push narratives. Or, as you said, hammer their mod

Economists in the public sphere are a fraction of practising economists and are often bought and paid for to push narratives. Or, as you said, hammer their models to fit their theories. Economics as a field though does create good models and predictions, but most of those are in the private sector, where money matters and weeds out faulty models.