Particulary in response to Rod and Brad: If you had ever listened to physicists and historians mock the jargon and style of positive neoclassical economics you would not pass the comments of postmodern literary criticism that you do. To ridicule what you do not understand is to underline that you do not understand it. Postmodern deconstructionists should also stay in their own field, which is literature and humanities, not economics. I hold no brief for the content of the works of Foucault or Baudrillard, who, by the way, quite disagree with one another. It seems to me that they have taken the subject matter of what once was Moral Theology and dealt with it from the point of view subjective fallen nature. If God is dead [They misunderstand Nietzsche on this.], and all the works of God are dead, then there is nothing but the unconstrained experience of fallen nature. From a Buddhist point of view, they speak of and from samsara, the experience of birth and death. I am not interested in plumbing this illusion, though I conceed the requirement that those working in the humanities do so. >From time to time, in their discourse, however, they do rise above the illusion to give it, however sureptitiously, sufficient structure to alow them to go on talking. As I read Baudrillard's FORGET FOUCAULT, I extract the following perhaps useful assertions. Faucault's discussion of sex is not about sex, but about constraints on sex. His discussion of power is not about power, but about constraints on power. [I profess no special knowledge about sex, but I am aware that the Political Science has dealt with constitutions, voting procedures, pressure groups and political parties - all of which are discussions of the structure of or constraint on power, and not of power itself. NOW economics is about relative scarcity, that is, a particular constraint on wealth, and not wealth itself. Does this tell us anything? It is not a new idea, as anyone who has read John Rae, E.G. Wakefield, Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, or Joseph Schumpeter knows. Schumpeter spoke of the rupturing of the static circular flow with its associated relative scarcities. Economics, as we now have it, is not about wealth, but about the constraints on wealth. Is this a directive as we look to explain the present relatively unhappy situation?