Hypothetical economic studies and analyses are almost worthless. In normal science, you need something to be testable, verifiable, and reproducible. I'm quite sure none of these are possible. Just as a counterpoint, the US public primary school education is state run and funded, and has both poor outcomes and is the most expensive in the world [1]. Just because something is run or controlled by the state does not mea…
Theorists set the groundwork. They come up with a lot of vague notions and then move to work with experimentalists to figure out how they can test these notions. How to "prove" it.
But saying they are "worthless"? That's just hogwash. Even if wrong, they aren't worthless. (Hint: most of the time they are wrong) And yes, economics isn't as rigid as something like physics. But it is pretty complicated stuff and they don't have as much of a history and basic principles. They may not be a hard science (or some might say not even a science), but calling an analysis worthless is just bad. And saying that in "normal science" (it's just science) things need to be testable to be useful is also just wrong. I'd call string theorists mathematicians, but what they do isn't worthless.
If this is really the way people think science is done, we've got a big problem.