That game of telephone is certainly an enormous pain point, and I can imagine a future where I'm out of a job -- but it's extremely hard for me to see them learning to code.
And if what the economists needed to do could be programmed trivially with the help of AI then their job is probably also replaceable by AI.
That would be harder. I shuffled data into a new form; they wrote papers. All I had to understand was what they wanted, and how to get there; they had to understand enough of the world to argue that a given natural experiment showed drug X was an effective treatment for condition Y.