[pessimizer]

> Economics has basically gone in a circle the past century

The economics profession has generally become one paid for its conclusions, not for its research. There are very few people working in mainstream, evidence-based economics anymore, and I don't think they're exceptions, they're just working for people whose personal interests happen to coincide with evidence-based theory. If the theory and the backers diverge, the economists will hopefully find new backers, because the backers will definitely find new economists who deliver the answers they want.

> actual science and engineering has made immense progress

I don't believe so. It's pretty much the same as economics. Most studies are wrong, and the review/reward system in science is all screwed up. We've generally been coasting on the invention of the transistor for a long time, and benefiting from their getting smaller and smaller. Once we've hit the hard limit with that, we can ride parallelism to squeeze a large amount of additional performance - hopefully enough to make a few more algorithms that have been around for 70 years have some pragmatic usefulness, but I think we're close to the end of what transistors are going to give us.

The best thing we can do for science is to get rid of the perverse incentives that cause bad science, eradicate accepted bad science, and mine the good science that will come to light after that uncovering. That might get us another good 100 years without a major discovery.