Re: Give cheese to france?

[Kevin S. Van Horn]

R. A. Hettinga wrote:

By the way, one piece of evidence that economics is maturing into a real 
science is that it is becoming usable by "engineers";
   

Well, finance, anyway, where it is possible to calculate some risk.

You can't calculate prices, though. You discover them.

For commodities, if you could somehow discover the demand and supply 
curves and predict how they were going to move, you could in fact 
calculate what prices were going to be.  The problem is that you can 
only observe exactly one point on the demand or supply curve -- where it 
crosses the other curve.  You can't observe any other point until at 
least one of the two curves moves.  It's conceivable (although I'm not 
aware of anyone even attempting this) that if you had some (perhaps 
probabilistic) model for both curves as a function of some exogenous 
variables, that you might get some useful predictive information about 
prices.