As an academic field, economics is completely underperforming. It's no suprise interesting research comes from other areas, such as physics in this case.
"In this kind of science, complex systems, you're not aiming at making predictions [like] ... where the tennis ball will be at given place in given time," Battiston said.
It's nice to see that physicists are able to recognise the limits of knowledge when it comes to complex systems. You probably wouldn't hear a macroeconomist / econometrician say that, they would typically weigh in with some kind of prediction based on a dubious, self-referential model.
My guess is it's doing as well as any social science, probably better.
Economics should basically rebrand itself as a subfield of complex systems analysis.
I studied Econ for a long time and came away rather frustrated with the limited toolset. Statistics, Computer Science, Math and Physics have better tools available.