In economics, when you have a modern economy with n people bouncing around off each other, the level of complexity is sufficiently high that we don't have enough. There's no way of capturing the full body of knowledge we need to organize that society from the top down. It has to be a an unplanned, not centrally planned, a solution.
Nassim Taleb talks about the challenges of coping with uncertainty, predicting events, and understanding history. This wide-ranging conversation looks at investment, health, history and other areas where data play a key role. Taleb, the author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, imagines two countries, Mediocristan and Extremistan where the ability to understand the past and predict the future is radically different. Taleb's contention is that we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.