Economics has the exact opposite issue. We have this very strong theory about optimizing homogenous agents that create a pareto efficient outcome. Any empirical fact that doesn't fit (which happen to be almost all of them) is simply thrown out. Considering this it is quite logical why the main policy recommendation for the last 30 years was deregulate everything, remove all government intervention. The hope was to be finally able to observe some facts that could actually be reasoned about with the existing theories.