Academic economists tend to favor peers whose crafts exalt their own handiwork. In the social sciences and humanities, demand and supply are highly interlocking, circular, and self-legitimating. And the club subsists on tax and tuition dollars. The grounds for faith in an invisible-hand are rather slight. Society would gain a great deal if economists became more relevant.
Most economists are wiser about economic policy than the average voter.
The public needs their help. And in being relevant, economists would better learn economic judgment and become yet wiser. In fields such as medicine and chemistry important new decisions are made by trained experts. Even when an active patient makes his own medical decisions, he first obtains knowledge about his particular conditions and becomes a narrow sort of expert. Unlike an individual making his own medical decisions, however, public policy is something we decide collectively.