This. If you look at the right ideas of Macro 101, the success rate is pretty high. Bailouts, demand-side policy, properly applied monetary stimulus, expectations management and confidence. If you look at famous wrong ideas, their failure rate has been pretty high. Austerity, strong currencies, lazy ZIRP stimulus, do-nothing policy, inflation paranoia. What is true in macro before the recession has become more true. The econ pundits who focused on these Macro 101 truths have been mostly right, with the monetary guys being perhaps a little more right than the fiscal stimulus guys. This should not be surprising as the things that are "true" in econ are such by virtue of hundreds of years of examination and highly reasonable philosophy, which anyone who's bothered to study econ would know.

Most people who say "econ is not a science" have had little to no experience with people who conduct economics as a science. I understand the cargo-cultists and pundits are much louder voices, but someone good at "science" shouldn't lazily examine the most shallow voices and use that to conclude deep things about a field of study.

There's cargo cult science, and then there's cargo cult scientific criticism.