To my mind, economics is like astronomy, evolution or geology, first you look at what has happened and what happens and then you work out an explanation or recognize patterns, out of intellectual curiosity as much as anything and whether you can influence outcomes or not.
William Smith and Charles Darwin knew nothing about the finer workings of plate tectonics or DNA but worked out that the most likely explanations for what was actually observed were 'geology' and 'evolution'. There's no point trying to debunk their explanations on the basis that they didn't know about plate tectonics or DNA.
To paraphrase Peter Hitchens, capitalism (i.e. business i.e. micro-economics) is like the weather, it just is, it is a force of nature and the government should try not to meddle too much. Micro-economics is merely the study thereof. I know nothing about the practicalities of oil extraction, but when oil was over $100/barrel, it seemed quite likely to me that it would fall back to $30 or $40 because that is the normal state of affairs. There are simple explanations why, but the the explanations follow the facts and cannot influence them.
No government can predict how much people are prepared to pay for a particular good or service; how much it will cost to produce; whether you can do it profitably and so on. That is up to entrepreneurs to work out by trial, error and a large chunk of luck.
Macro-economics i.e. government policy is different. It is not like the weather, it is entirely man made by politicians who all have their own agenda and marginal voters and who sift through mountains of economic theories to find some which justify what they were going to do anyway.
But government policy can be studied the same as anything else. Over the past century or three, countries have tried implementing just about anything you can dream up - minimum wages; minimum or maximum prices; exchange controls; import and export duties; setting interest rates, NIRP and ZIRP; subsidising banks or any other industry for that matter; taxing this or the other activity or economic variable; means-tested, universal or contributory benefits; jobs guarantees and so on. Some have worked, most have failed.
At any time you will have people focussed on one or the other particular area, usually to the exclusion of all others, claiming that their solution is the Holy Grail, the Silver Bullet, the Panacea etc, despite it has all been tried before and we have good records on all this stuff and whether it led to a favourable outcome or not.
What's wrong with going back to basic principles and looking at what actually happened when a government did X, Y or Z?
And the fact is, that as crazy as these ideas sound to the brainwashed, my few favorite hobby horses (taxing land values and monopolies instead of turnover, wages or profits; replacing means-tested and contributory benefits with universal benefits; having free trade which includes abandoning The War On Drugs etc) have all been tried and tested and have always 'worked', without fail. None of these are the Holy Grail, Silver Bullet or Panacea because they do not seek to improve 'capitalism', which will never be perfect, they just go with the flow and make things better rather than worse. They work whether you understand them or not, whether you agree with some vague set of principles or not.
To sum up, it is far easier addressing the question "what happened when" than twatting about with hypothetical "what would happen if…"s
The only argument worth having is over which outcomes you want - if you actually want high land prices, high unemployment, low wages and profits, depressed growth, rampant inequality, government and trade deficits etc, then by all means, stick with what we've got. But at least be honest about what you want.