I do. Do we think economists are actually generating this understanding? I'd be curious to know about policy changes which have been the result of non-obvious insights from the field of economics.

I think it's one of our better attempts to understand a very large complex system! I think it's inherently very hard to do. I do think you can critique a lot of things about the field and ideology, and so on, but I don't think that's an inherent problem of economics.

> non-obvious

I'd maybe question this a bit. I suspect that many things we consider obvious are only so because of the field of economics -- but that's admittedly only an initial hunch.

I mean, economics is a study in self modifying systems that change based upon what you learn about them. Much like chaos theory wasn't something we innately understand, the same is true for economics.

Hence economics is a probabilistic field. The things that occur have a probability behind them. Instead of a policy that needs X to happen the policy can be adapted to "If A then B, if X then Y".