ECONOMISTS CAN BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

Brockway (The End of Economic Man, 1991, etc.) provides here a selection from ten years of musings on ``The Dismal Science'' from his monthly column for The New Leader. Proving himself as crotchety, humanist, and left-leaning as ever, Brockway tackles such capitalist-economic sacred cows as the theory of the natural rate of unemployment (``counterproductive as well as immoral''), the GNP (the figure generally used is ``a moldy fudge''), and even the seemingly irreproachable law of supply and demand. He points out in the title essay that economics is not a natural science at all; it is ``a branch of ethics.'' Human beings can control supply and demand (by charging less than they could for a life-saving drug, for example) and they could reduce unemployment if they wanted to. And once again Brockway poses that challenging and provocative question: Why don't they?