In recent years much has been said and written about the economics of small units and the virtues of individual or cooperative self-help. This trend has been spurred by several factors. The soaring cost of oil underscored the need to conserve energy and eliminate waste by every conceivable srneans. The spiraling cost of food, even in America; has made kitchen gardening more rewarding. The outbreak of double-digit inflation has forced many families to undertake more do-it-yourself jobs. The persistence of economic stagnation in industrial societies with stubbornly high rates of unemployment has impelled more people to create work for themselves. And there is the appalling case of poor nations, burdened with burgeoning populations, where the search for food and jobs has become a matter of life and death.

Fear of massive unemployment have greeted technological changes ever since the Industrial Revolution. Far from destroying jobs, however, rapid technological advance generally has created many new ones. In the quarter-century following World War II, for example, the industrial economies were flooded with new technologies, while unemployment shrank to exceptionally low levels Yet there is good reason to take seriously the recent outpouring of concern that microelectronic technologies will have a fundamental impact on both the numbers and types of jobs in the industrial world in the coming decades.

Central to this concern is the pervasiveness of microelectronics The microelectronic revolution could affect employment in enterprises ranging from steelworks to banks since no technology in history has had such a broad range of potential applications in the workplace. For another thing, goods that incorporate microelectronic devices generally require significantly less labor to produce than the goods they replace, a fact that extends the employment implications of the technology well beyond its direct impacts on automation. And a third cause of apprehension is the speed with which the technology is advancing. Although microelectronic controls will not sweep through the industrial world overnight, most experts expect them to be firmly established in production processes, products, and daily activities over the next two decades.

Outside a tiny loft on downtown Church Street, a group of people are clustered, hoping for late ticket cancellations for the current production at The Theatre Exchange, a new OffOff Broadway group whose space seats about fifty. The settings and, indeed, the very platform upon which the audience sits are ingeniously fashioned from scrap lumber found along Canal Street. The cast is young, but Alex Demetriev has directed them with such intensity that they successfully capture the spirit and savagery of post W.W.I Germany.

On Broadway, Christopher Reeve, formerly of Superman fame, now plays a legless, homosexual Vietnam veteran in a comedy-drama that is part of a series of plays about the Talley family, written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lanford Wilson. The production is supported by extensive publicity and a full ad campaign in the media.