The paper economy / David T. Bazelton.

Preliminary: 1. Introduction to the paper economy - 2. Ideology and private government -- The paper: 3. What is property? - 4. Money/credit and other magic - 5. More paper magic - 6. The big debts - 7. Taxes: the house's take -- The institutions: 8. Corporations I - 9. Corporations II -- 10. What the big underwriter does - 11. Antitrust - Elusive Arcadia -- The people: 12. Managers and managerialism - 13. More on the managerial revolution - 14. Paper rich and real poor -- The issues: 15. The overriding issue of organization - 16. Politics and power - 17. Postscript on the Soviet-American confrontation.

"The author argues that the American "economy is doing a poor job of allocating the nation's resources. Thus hunger and grain surpluses exist side by side, and education is pauperized while millions are invested in to redundant promotion of identical toothpastes and cosmetics.""-Saturday Review

"Not since Thurman Arnold wrote the Folklore of Capitalism a quarter-century ago has the irrationality of the American economy been exposed to such scrutiny as it receives in The Paper Economy. Mr. Bazelton's argument is that we have now achieved the technological means to provide not only for the sustenance of our own people, but to go beyond this and achieve real abundance for everyone. Yet we cling to the myths of scarcity as if we were a nation of monks. The managers of our industrial complex are, Mr. Bazelton argues, more interested in their balance sheets than in the productivity of their plants and the rational allocation of all the things they can produce....The effect of The Paper Economy is to clarify the system of power and wealth which structures our lives for us - and to prepare us for the coming confrontation between the powers of business and those of government which was foreshadows in the dramatic steel-price controversy of 1962. It is a book that will upset conventional opinion on the most important subject of the day." -- book jacket.