Tim Harford:

I do not regard my own confusion as an indictment of modern macroeconomics, but I am struck by the soul-searching that has gripped the profession in the face of the economic crisis. The worry is not so much that macroeconomists did not forecast the problem – bad forecasts are more a sign of a complex world than intellectual bankruptcy – but that macroeconomics seems unable to provide answers. Sometimes it cannot even ask the right questions.

Your daily dose of Simpsons:

Smithers: That's quite a nice model, sir.

Burns: Model?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.