Even on matters such as in other sciences have long since been settled, he who today looks for the guidance of general acceptance in political economy will find a chaos of discordant opinions.

- Henry George, 1897

How many fields [other than economics] are there in which a big practical question pops up and the Nobel-level guys are on opposite sides yelling at each other?…They aren’t dickering over some minor proposal or detail. They’re talking about whether or not we should dump nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of stimulus money into the economy. And it isn’t a question that should be sitting at the far cutting edge of research, like how many dimensions your string theory needs to have. The raison d’etre of the discipline is to deal with stuff like this.

– Ezra Klein, 2009