Sure they would. There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle really can be squared" cranks out in the general public. The main difference is that in economics there often is a financial reason why people hold weird ideas rather than just being crazy.
>There are plenty of "Einstein was wrong" or "The circle really can be squared" cranks out in the general public.
Yes, but those are kooks, where the consensus between physicists is specific and solid and their predictions either pan out or not (except in wild areas of exploration, like string theory and such).
Whereas with economics, economists don't see eye to eye (except on trivial parts that are 99% mathematical results), and anything applied with the intention of making a prediction is rarely better than random guesses.
Simply one discipline concerns a fixed reality, where preferences and opinions don't matter as to the behavior of e.g. matter, energy, etc. and we try to model it as best as we can (a fixed target).
And the other a human activity, where political biases, private interests, personality quirks, morality, cultural norms, backroom deals, laws, outlaws, the press, and everything in between pull in various directions, and where even if we could get close to an accurate predictive model, there would still be huge (trillion dollar huge) motives (political, financial, career related, etc) to make black appear as white and vice versa.
To put in blunt terms, the difference is between science and social science.
In economics the outcomes are always modeled with one or few input variables: something went up/down because something else went up/down etc reality is rarely so trivial or well understood. Add that with the ability to impact geopolitics you get schools of thought and cult like following.
Nobody outside of theoretical physics cares about rivalry between string theory and loop quantum gravity perhaps not many within. However lot of people care about their economic schools of thought and it standing in academia/public discourse, as many regulatory/ political decisions are made (justified at-least) with some economic/sociological theory or other.