This is what (some) people in finance do: make models to predict things, because if something about the future can be predicted to a sufficient degree of accuracy, it's generally possible to make money from it. In economics, the incentives are slightly different; in academia, the incentives are to publish interesting/novel/topical papers, like with other social sciences, not necessarily to make repeatable predictions. In social science nobody gets punished for making an interesting model that hasn't been rigorously proven to make repeatable predictions, while in finance on average better models make more money and get rewarded more. But sharing an effective model means other people can use the predictions too, meaning you capture less value from the predictions yourself, so people with an effective model have an incentive not to share it
As for lots of data, doing proper econometric models requires really well gathered data. Data is published quarterly or yearly, so you do have comparable series for international country level macroeconomics, but those are actually short considering how many variables must interact.
> Especially because it's not possible to create true controlled experiments
Cosmology has zero-experiments. It is a completely observational science [2]. And in fact, has very bad data. Basically a time-frozen snapshot of the universe from a particular point in space. They can't even make predictions about the future, only about what some new dataset of that same time-frozen universe will say. Economics on the other hand has the benefit of lots data about interventions and their consequences. There is so much opportunity to develop models by making predictions and checking what happens.
[1] variable goes up or down or stays the same.
[2] The fact that the roots of modern science lie in a purely observational no-experiment discipline of astronomy is lost on many.