As the Yoram Bauman joke goes, economists have managed to predict nine out of the last five recessions. For an intellectual craft that has succeeded in attracting an admirable number of students and typically generates pay more significant than other curricula, economics never seems to live up to its own expectations with an abysmal record of predictive power. The often considerable mathematics and analytical reasoning demanded to contribute to the academic discussion of economics seems more often than not wasted on modeling that is typically only either unprofound or unrealistic.
At times economists have realized insights that are indeed worthy of a level of examination and perhaps even popular veneration. The efficiency of the market mechanism, the necessary signaling of prices, the sound management of currency, the general harm of impediments on trade all among other realizations had been made for the benefit of society at the hands and minds of economic thinkers.
But It's difficult to see how much of contemporary academic economic modeling is necessary abstraction as opposed to pretentious embellishment. It should be a somewhat damning piece of evidence to note how the equations expressed in apparently intimidating Greek letters and mathematical notation are more often than not simple thoughts capable of being summed up in a sentence or less in plain unambiguous English. It seems that either economists are complicit in applauding their community's intelligence by inventing superficial verbiage or more simply that they were never told that brevity is the soul of wit (or perhaps a grand portion of them are simply not too witty).
One error that should be confronted at the forefront is the conflagration of economics with mathematics. Mathematics, at its heart is as precise as a science can be and is highly deductive in nature whilst economics, for all its systemization, is approached from an inductive analysis of human behavior and social occurrences that at their heart are difficult to quantify without drastic simplification.
The heavy usage of mathematics in economics leads to an unhealthy inferred conclusion, specifically that the modeling utilized by economists can indeed claim legitimately that same mathematical precision. The models invented by economists are obviously not full views of reality and human society; they are representations of general correlations of different indicators in society. To assume that numbers can properly be fitted into equations with equally valid numbers popping out assumes that there are absolutely no exogenous factors and that the relation between all variables in such an equation are exact.
It should not be too weighty of a generalization to say that this is never the case. In economics courses for students and for back of the envelope calculations, perhaps there is no significant crime in tabulating general guesses through simple models, but the idea that such results, particularly in the fields of developmental economics, labor economics and macroeconomics, are even reasonable approximations of future occurrences in mostly farcical in the vast majority of cases. It become even more maddening when some can make well-repute careers in pumping numbers into ineffectual forecasting functions while boastfully clinging to the pretending that such calculations qualify as a scientific take on management.
Apart from simply being imperfect representations of actual economic indicators, the obsessive use of models can blind-sight the user to those many exogenous factors left in that sacred Latin prayer: O Domine, ceteris paribus! Because the human brain and the paper it uses are not especially apt at cross-calculating on a 3-dimensional plane, most equations limit their variables to two: a dependent and independent on a vertical and horizontal dimension. All other variables that might influence the calculus are ignored and held constant, a necessary measure for simplification and to gain a "scientific" and experimental view on the relationship, but a measure which if ignored could do significant damage to the naïve wielder.
The problem of exogenous variables is one fundamental to the common deficiencies of economic forecasting. It is not necessarily difficult to characterize past economic downturns with new modeling, yet to see what kind of disasters might befall the economic situation in the future would be impossible. More often that not, large and previously unseen economic shocks are neither unquantifiable or particularly shocking in retrospect. Still, in an ideal world to produce useful forecasting, economists would need to know of these exogenous factors even if at the time there are unseen or unheeded.
Economists perhaps rightly can represent downturns are lapses in effective demand, but often these lapse often stem from apparently happenstance occurrences, "black swans" if you will, which are only visible in hindsight. Much of economics then seems to be thinkers trying to explain previous facts with any use in predicting new ones. At that many analysts have a modus operandi similar to religious apologists, already knowing their conclusion and desperately looking for a coherent way to rationalize and accommodate it to fact.
I don't mean to harken discontentment for economists in their context, but outside of it, economic study is apt to be routinely misunderstood and misused by people with personal or political incentive to do so; the intricacy of well formulated models is lost on the ambitious.
Of course credit should be given where due, and varieties of less pretentious economics have managed to limit themselves with a necessary significant degree of rigor and self-criticism; these limits only work to expand their possibilities.