Economics is about as hard as any other modern applied science. I.e. pretty damn hard, and practitioners are deserving of the same respect accorded to, for instance, social scientists and psychologists, who deal in similarly hard to capture domains.
>It was in large part of history even referred to as political economy for crying out loud.
And it stopped being referred to as "political economy" because of the fundamental upheaval the field of study went through in the early 20th century, which completely reshaped the practice of economics into something completely different from what it was in Adam Smith and Marx's times.
>For the wealthy. Most of the world is still used as cheap labour for the privilege of the West.
I happen to be from one of the countries whose people you would deprive of agency and deride as "cheap labor" and I would argue most of our issues stem from a market where the powerful have way too much opportunity to make sure that regulations that will benefit them and curtail competition are passed, not from the free market. In fact, making our market freer would only have positive effects.
A great contemporary example of how the free market can uplift poorer countries is Rwanda.
>If a majority of the involved "scientists" are surprised that a crash shows up, it strongly suggests that it's largely based on speculation and external motives rather than objective science.
Ecologists are right now scrambling to find explanations for a number of emerging phenomena. Does the fact that we do not have a complete and universally valid model of ecology mean that ecology is "largely based on speculation and external motives rather than objective science"?