SEMAINE D'ÉTUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIOUE ETC. 
5 
FRISCE 
First point raised by Prof. ALrLais: It is obvious that my paper 
presents what I personally think is the most appropriate procedure 
for constructing a national economic decision model. It represents 
my personal creed at this stage. I thought that this was so obvious 
‘hat there was no need for making it more explicit at this confe- 
rence. Second point, Prof. ALLAIS objected against my use of the 
term « gross » in connection with the preference functions. I cannot 
accept this criticism because the sense in which I used the world was 
precisely defined in mathematical terms, and I always used the term 
consistently in that sense, 
Third Point. Prof. ALLAIS mentioned that different people may 
have different preference functions (and he might have added that 
one person may have different preference functions at different points 
of time). All this is, of course, quite true. This problem is essentially 
a political issue, and must be handled as such. We have no other 
way of finally deciding about political issues than to use the political 
machinery existing in the country in question. 
It is not our task at this conference to discuss various political 
theories and types of political machinery. We as economists simply 
have to take for granted that somehow the nature of what we de- 
signate as the national preference function, is arrived at. I have been 
liscussing this before in several connections and this is the last time 
[ shall repeat it at this conference. 
THEIL 
Several discussants have argued that it is not easy to construc 
social preference functions and I can agree with this. Nevertheless, 
[ would like to suggest that the exercise be carried out. The reason 
s not that I believe that within a few years this kind of decision- 
making will be put into practice. It is that the procedure provides 
1s with a method which enables us to find out which parts of the 
Frisch - pag. 3s