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You are the perfect audience for The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols. He covers all of this.

Somewhat of a counterpoint - I didn't make it all the way through this book, but I think it has an interesting thesis:

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters: https://amzn.to/3aHdIBB

In fact, Chomsky's formal training was IN linguistics. He was not an expert in politics in any way, and hence his opinion was as valid as anyone's in academia, for example. This is even mentioned in Tom Nichols's "The Death of Expertise".

The vitamin C episode is also covered in the same book :)

See Tom Nichols' "The Death of Expertise"[1] (now also a book) for more on your sentiment.

1. http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/

If you're interested in a decent analysis of this phenomenon in modern societies, I can recommend a recent book "The Death of Expertise" by Tom Nichols. The author also explores some ideas for how to counter this trend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

For anyone interested to read on the subject of "misguided intellectual egalitarianism":

"The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MYCDVHH

Of course, there are some older well known books touching on this like Hofstadter, etc.

Also of interest: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-...)

No, there are actually experts that we should rely on. Of course no economist is a perfect predicter- predicting the future is hard.

Tom Nichols’ book The Death of Expertise is relevant here.

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As for your specific points:
- Paul Krugman, on his major predictions, has been incredibly prescient. He was talking about media bothsidesism, a major reason for this political moment, in 1999. He said America was being lied into war in Iraq in 2002. He predicted the effects of stimulus in America and Europe. The guy is a genius and so he becomes a target for his political enemies. (Re the stock prediction: he withdrew this in a few days. It was a minor prediction. The predictions above were long term predictions.)
The issue is that conservative economics has been captured by the conservative propaganda machine which amplifies minor corrected predictions like this while ignoring the huge long term mistake that the right’s “economists” made about inflation in response to stimulus.

- The business cycle causes recessions, yes. Not sure what you mean by economic policy. But both monetary and fiscal (tax) policy has big effects on entry and exit from recession. And also public debt affects provision of public policies like the social safety net.