That's basically the crux of Robert Shiller's recent article titled A Crisis of Understanding.
Maybe it's not so much that we don't know the cause of economic depressions as that there are so many potential culprits. Each of which could be, if not THE cause, at least the main cause but could also just be a peripheral phenomenon. The causes given for the Great Depression were:
[M]isguided government interference with markets, high income and capital gains taxes, mistaken monetary policy, pressures towards high wages, monopoly, overstocked inventories, uncertainty caused by the reorganization plan for the Supreme Court, rearmament in Europe and fear of war, government encouragement of labor disputes, a savings glut because of population shrinkage, the passing of the frontier, and easy credit before the depression.
Many of these explanations could be recycled for the Great Recession and the following could be added:
[U]nprecedented real-estate bubbles, a global savings glut, international trade imbalances, exotic financial contracts, sub-prime mortgages, unregulated over-the-counter markets, rating agencies’ errors, compromised real-estate appraisals, and complacency about counterparty risk.
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