The &quot;very few experts saw it coming&quot; claim is patently false. &quot;Very little media and popular attention was paid to the warnings from experts -- coming from several different economic approaches -- that saw it coming because there was lots of financial interest of lots of powerful people in <i>not</i> having people concerned about it&quot; would be more accurate, but kind of undermine the idea that new models are a solution.<p>Which is not to dismiss the value of &quot;big computing&quot; and agent-based modelling in economics, just that the Great Recession wasn&#x27;t a failure of experts to see where the course led that can be mitigated by having better models.<p>In any case, if you want to proceed that agent-based modelling can do better for macroeconomic modelling, than, well, we don&#x27;t need long  advocacy pieces, we need published research.  There&#x27;s sort of an aside in the article that seems to suggest that the authors think that economics research funding is inadequate, which, if it&#x27;s a real issue the authors are concerned about, is probably a more fruitful subject for a long advocacy piece than &quot;we need this particular kind of model for this domain, even though we can&#x27;t point to a model of this type that does better in the domain than existing models, just some good models in related-but-distinct domains.&quot;