The review of George Szpiro’s Pricing the Future: Finance, Physics, and the 300-Year Journey to the Black-Scholes Equation (New York: Basic Books, 2012) in the current issue of The Economist goes on and on about the wonders of mathematics (“The Mathematics of Markets,” January 14, 2012). Options and futures markets would purportedly be impossible without the so-called Black-Scholes equation, which was concocted by Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, and Fischer Black in 1973, and for which they got a Nobel prize in economics in 1997. Curiously, the equation’s failings are mentioned only toward the end of the review. In particular, it mistakenly assumes that the movement of stockmarket prices is Gaussian, just like many physical phenomena. This is sheer nonsense, of course. Which is why the trading firm set up by Black and Scholes collapsed ignominiously soon after its inauguration. Much money invested on the strength of their joint Nobel prize was squandered. Sadly, neither Szpiro’s book nor the review venture into the reasons why searching for the magical equation for pricing the future is a hopeless endeavor. And that is that any equation, no matter how close to the data from the past, can be easily subverted in the future by those who are aware of it. Economics is not physics. The mathematics of markets, my ass.