My experience of working with economists, is that they are very good at creating _explicative models_. Models that can explain what happened using past, present

My experience of working with economists, is that they are very good at creating _explicative models_. Models that can explain what happened using past, present, and future data/insights. But these are very rarely good _predictive models_, which is an entirely different field. Economists also have a tendency to lack practitioner thinking, misunderstand or grossly average actor motives, and more generally like to model every actor as an optimization problem, which rarely reflect real world scenarios. All in all, I'm not really putting any weight on what economists models could predict of the future, though I think they have value in explaining the dynamics of past events.