I disagree that it's an engineering problem. How are you going to model the supply & demand, the wants and desires, and complex transactions occurring among hundreds of millions of people? It just seems like hubris to me, but I'm open to the possibilities.
The same way we predict how the trillions of trillions of air molecules behave when we predict the weather: we build models of aggregate behavior, try to understand relationships, run simulations and test our predictions. We're not 100% right all of the time, but we now have the ability to prepare for disasters days in advance and re-route airplanes around storms before they hit. Weather prediction and the activity around it was once an intractable problem but now is a huge, huge benefit to society.
The things you bring up are not even the hard part… The difficulty is that the system is dominated by feedback loops. I still think it's within the realm of 'engineering can improve this'.
The field of Economics has been attempting to answer that for a rather long time. I don't mean to be glib - it turns out to be a damnably hard problem that's been battled by thousands for centuries. There's easily enough modeling, math, and intellectual know-how going into it to make it a fine engineering discipline (albeit ununified). Heck, the quants basically weaponized it into a science.
Of couse, the real problem is which model(s) to use, since that affects the system. The answer to that is probably "all of them", picking whichever one seems more appropriate. I'm thinking like a physicist here: sometimes you ignore gravity, and sometimes you ignore wave-partical duality.
