Very easy to give a fact-free hot take, but I thought I'd take a look at the "research" section of Harvard's economics department website at the moment[1] to see what they work on. I'm not an economist but it seems like a pretty serious attempt to understand the real-world economy. Picking a paper purely at random (again, I'm not an economist so I just clicked through a few and they seem similar-ish to me in a broad sense) this[2] is a pretty serious analysis of industrial policy with some real-world case studies about the Oxford-AstraZeneca partnership around the covid vaccine, German industrial policy given the transition from heavy industry to climate tech and some stuff about how Israel has created a favourable climate for tech startups. That not real-world enough for you?

[1] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/research-papers

[2] https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.ed...