Some of the biggest problems in academia (especially in marketing) now revolve around similar phenomena of 'momentum' or 'clustering.' It's incredibly difficult to predict or model this kind of behavior, and even more difficult to take advantage of these trends. We see the same kind of "well, if we ignore this difficult-to-model process, then the equations look good" in physics, so where's the outcry over the Navier-Stokes theorems?
I don't think you can call this a failure of academics, it seems more like next on a long bucket list of questions to answer.
As an aside -- some of the explanations of M-M and CAPM are wrong, which is straight up first semester finance.
Physics has one major advantage over economics - in physics, the system you're modelling is not sentient and actively trying to exploit flaws in your model, whereas we see this time and time again in economics.
I don't think you can call this a failure of academics, it seems more like next on a long bucket list of questions to answer.
As an aside -- some of the explanations of M-M and CAPM are wrong, which is straight up first semester finance.