If economists did come to a broad consensus, many politicians would still ignore that consensus if it didn't happen to fit their worldview or the interests of their major donors.
See: climate science.
See: climate science.
https://cclark.gcsu.edu/Survey%20of%20Republicans,%20Democra...
> Republicans and Democrats show identical distributions of responses for 18 propositions (41 percent) while economists and Democrats show identical distributions for 7 propositions (16 percent) and economists and Republicans share identical response distributions for 9 propositions (20 percent). These results suggest a gap between the economic views of the political parties and economists’ views.
Economists aren't uncovering an underlying truth, they're basically building toy models. These toy models might approximate economic systems in a narrow range of controlled circumstances, but things rapidly deteriorate outside that range. The problem is that people assume the models reflect reality, and make bets based on that assumption.
It would be nice if economists focused on fully Bayesian models with Gaussian process priors and long tailed (ideally Levy alpha-stable with a low alpha bias) likelihood functions. At least then the uncertainty of their models would be absolutely clear, and black swan type events would be partially factored in.
No, in fact they don't. It's hard to believe, I know.
I've been drawn to question what to do about that quite often, but I havent happened across an acceptable answer as yet.