[jerf]

'Aside from that, I always wonder why we have never had a "Great Economic Project."'

The nature of politics is such that if the government funded such a thing, the only acceptable outcome for it to come to is that the people funding it already had the correct model. The alternative is that the politicians funding it would have spent a lot of political capital to get that funding only to be told that they're wrong, probably wrong about everything.

On one level or another, even politicians realize that they might as well just cut out the middleman here and operate on the vigorous and loud assumption that they are already correct about economics and anyone who disagrees is the literal embodiment of evil.