We are in a paradox, first amassing big data to intercorrelate everything and tying all the data sets together into one giant machine (Mirowski ).

At he same time we are missing the big thing going on – the undoing of the planet – that we needed to know. The who, what why and when – and alternatives.
How can these two co-exist? Doesn’t the promise of the first – knowing everything – expect to know the one thing that we needed to know?

How much of economics is just filling in the gaps in the fabric (like exporting the Chinese person recognition software to Chile and tyying the results to consumer data sets) and how much is struggling for insight into the overall situation?