Below is a quote from John Gray’s review of David Brooks’ book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. He’s talking about how the recent economic crisis was supposed to be impossible because of the psychic ability of quantitative models to predict the future of the economy.
[M]any economists refused to accept that such a crisis was possible—captivated as they were by the belief that quantitative models could predict the future, sheltering the field from messy reality. Economists were thus incapable of perceiving the dangers that were mounting around them. The attempt to domesticate the uncertainties of the future by turning them into calculable risks was discredited by the crash. A mode of thinking that was supposed to be supremely rational has proved in practice to be little more than an exercise in harebrained cleverness.