George Stigler in the lecture “Economics or Ethics?” (1980):
The proposition that economists are not addicted to taking frequent and disputatious policy positions will appear incredible to most non-economists, and implausible to many economists. The reason, I believe, for this opinion is that in talking to a non-economist, there is hardly anything in economics except policy for the economist to talk about. The layman is unequipped to discuss with an economist the problems that concern professional economics at any time: he would find that in their professional writing the well-known columnists of Newsweek are quite incomprehensible. The typical article in a professional journal is unrelated to public policy—and often apparently unrelated to this world. Whether the amount of policy-advising activity of economists is rising or falling I do not know, but it is not what professional economics is about.
The great economists, then, have not been preoccupied with preaching. Indeed…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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