Saturday Review published in January 1972 six articles which explored the growing unreality and dehumanization some call it irrelevance of economic theory and analysis.1 The statement is nowhere more applicable than to the subfield of economics, labeled microeconomics, which deals with the individual calculations of producers and consumers within market systems. Macroeconomics, conversely, deals with aggregate movements in income and output, and it is in this area that economics, as a discipline and as a tool of public policy, has registered its presumed accomplishments. The macroeconomists, moreover, are the best-known economists (Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, and those who join the Council of Economic Advisers). As John Kenneth Galbraith has made so clear, economists recognize but make no attempt to reconcile profound contradictions between the two subfields; conventional textbooks pronounce inefficient those individual market systems dominated by a few large producers (the oligopolies, or bellwether industries), but the same textbooks describe the overall economy as having proved itself efficient (through growth).2 It is worth noting that all the management fads derived from economic thinking come from microeconomics (where inefficiency supposedly runs rampant); that is where we got the favorite of the 1960's, systems analysis, and the currently popular concepts of evaluation and productivity. As was the case with systems analysis, few are spending much time examining the underlying premises of the models they use. To do so would expose those premises for the anomalies they are, and it would demonstrate to all of us that little of useful