it's a kind of Everest no-one has climbed, though many gaze at the summit longingly, and many have fallen off its slippery faces...
anyone that really consistently pulled it off would be able to name and number their income. with all that computers can do to ease our toil, it's understandable that man should want to use them to find the rosetta stone of economics.
until humans become completely linear creatures (too many heading that way imo), those who want to guarantee their winnings merely have to tithe a chunk to the lobbyists, pressuring politicians to hamstring regulators. it can get messy though, which is why everyone would like to find an algorithm to make them easy squillions, like a blackjack 'system'.
back to dreaming of the view from everest! ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
i think what no-one ever says is that you can't preview, prognosticate, or prophetise consistently about something as inherently nebulous or unpredictable as the sum of millions of individual choices.
No you can't. What you can do is construct a decision-making environment that simulates¹ what might happen when this, that, or the other comes down. Now, unregenerate cynics equate "simulate" with "pulling it out of the air." I prefer to define it as "a systematic procedure resulting in a very informed guess." :-)
Fortunately, there are certain patterns and breakouts - statistically, psycho-socially, and others - to human behavior that can help boundary the problem. And, with a little bit of intellectual effort and humility, it's possible to get the general thrust of things. Best example is Exponential Growth, if you've only got x amount of something, and you can only use x-y% of it then using the Growth rate it is possible to determine, more-or-less accurately, when you ain't got no more x. When you ain't got no more x either you - and everybody else - does without or find a substitute. That's a general law applicable across the whole range of human activities.
