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Salemicus comments on Rationality Quotes Thread May 2015 - Less Wrong
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Economists are something like social scientists with physics envy. They still don't manage to get good at prediction and have a corpus of well replicated phenomena.
Economists do have a large corpus of well replicated phenomena, and they do have good predictive ability. The problem is that people want economists to make predictions on subjects that are least understood, or even ones that economic theory suggests cannot be generally predicted, such as stock market movements. Sure, economists can't do that, but they (mostly) don't claim to be able to do that.
What kind of phenomena do you mean?
I don't think that the call for stock market prediction is central to an argument about economist. If someone can predict stock market movements in some capacity they make money on Wall Street instead about being open about their theories.
Changes in unemployment numbers or GDP on the other hand seem to be more like the job of economists.
Is there anything like a trial registry in economics where economists can publish predictions before they go out and gather data?
There are plenty of before-the-fact published predictions by economists. See e.g. here.