This week's news that retail sales were unchanged in April elicited much concern from experts about the economy's fate.

But "there is a risk of getting a bit carried away on this point," David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates, writes in Canada's Financial Post.

"First, March is no longer a disappointment. The retail sales data were revised up across the board to rates that were in line with expectations, so the flat April reading has to be viewed in that context." The March gain was revised to 1.1 percent from the initial estimate of 0. 9 percent.

In addition, "really good news was in one segment that has proven in the past to be a leading indicator for consumer spending in aggregate: restaurants," Rosenberg explains.

"Eating in may be out but dining out is in. Receipts, not including bar tips, jumped 0.7 percent in April, the third increase in as many months, taking the trend to a sector-leading 8.6 percent year-over-year growth."

And there's more. "Restaurants are the only service sector represented in the retail sales reports, and the data show spending in the overall service space is booming," Rosenberg notes.

Elsewhere on the economic front, Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, says economic models have their place, but they also have their limits.

Neither simple models nor complex models are "useful for providing the practical advice that policymakers need in a crisis," he writes on Project Syndicate. "To make them useful, evidence is required."

And indeed, "an evidentiary revolution is already underway" in economics, Eichengreen explains. Big data is one example. It "promises to enhance our ability to understand and even predict" phenomena such as how prices respond to economic news, he says.

"A second approach relies not on big data but on new data," Eichengreen writes. "Economists are using automated information-retrieval routines, to scrape bits of novel information about economic decisions from the [Internet]."

Third, there's historical evidence. "The global financial crisis was good for economic history, because it directed attention to previous crises and to the insights that could be gleaned from studying them," Eichengreen notes.

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