This week I have been reading Walter Wriston's feisty little 1992 book "The Twilight of Sovereignty, etc," an exuberant paean to a galactic world of knowledge workers the "limits to growth" people never knew. Wriston takes a whole chapter to trash the common instruments of economic measurement, especially the GNP. Listen to a representative riff from that chapter (Where We Stand): The standard industrial codes that once told how industry is organized are now out-of-date. Of the twelve major code divisions, only two reflect the service industry, although about 80 percent of Americans work in a service business. Accurate numbers are available on the number of brakemen on American railroads but not on the number of computer programmers. This is but one example of why today's econ- omy cannot be fitted into yesterday's standards. If basic macroeconomic measurements, such as the GNP and productive capacity, do not mean what they once did, the question then becomes: Can we construct new, more reliable measures of the kind of economy we now have? Well, I always thought there was something hokey and astigmatic about the GNP, but I wasn't ready to call it out on Main Street like Wriston, and long before computers appeared in every office Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were already around to tell us that every year billions of woman-hours of housework and child-rearing were disappearing into The Great Bit-Bucket In The Sky without so much as an audible whimper. No doubt many books have appeared since Wriston's with the same thesis. Just how are labor and its yields figured in present company, pray? valis Occupied America -- By viewing economic issues as subordinate phenomena and securing the freedom of all to sleep beneath the bridges of Washington, the GOP has convinced at least itself that the very best of good societies will be conjured --