What is the relevance of our aggregated intellectual capital and its eventual “usefulness”/ “purpose”? 

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article ‘Capital Man’ by Emily Eakin – Eakin quotes Branko Milanovic, who is the  2014 visiting presidential professor at CUNY Graduate Center here in New York.
Milanovic in conversation with Eakin quotes – “There is this sterility to the mathematical models, which are not grounded in reality but in what somebody imagines the behavior of people to be. Economics has lost its taste to address big issues. We have gone into tiny issues, the extreme of which is Freakonomics, which addresses the behavior of sumo wrestlers and why drug dealers live with their mothers. In Spain we have 25-percent unemployment, and you’re discussing sumo wrestlers!”