Adam Smith

NEW YORK -- Leaders of both politics and business find it to their advantage to deal with economic statistics by saying (and hoping) that no one can understand them. ''Contradictory'' was the word the current president of the United States used last summer to define if not explain the fact that the stock market and corporate profits were soaring while the nation's median wage was going down.But this year's numbers of July seem simple enough for almost anyone. On the morning of July 5, the federal government announced that national unemployment had dropped from 5.6 percent to 5.3 percent, and that the average wage of 83 million non-management production workers had risen 9 cents to $11.82 an hour.

From the standpoint of Adam Smith -- and perhaps Ivan Boesky -- Robert Coles grew up in a dysfunctional home.His mother rolled bandages for the Red Cross, served meals in a soup kitchen, sewed clothes for poor children and visited hospital patients. She loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent checks to the Catholic Worker, read to the blind and occasionally irritated her son, Robert, with her "pietistic side."His engineer father, a "skeptical scientist," inclined more toward Republicans Wendell Willkie and Robert Taft.

THE EVOLUTION, from the simple to the intricate, from casualness to intensity, is visible in almost every contemporary American recreation, whether it's bicycling, roller-skating, cross-country skiing or boating.Even wind-surfing, which started life as a simple and inexpensive alternative to sailing, has succumbed to what appears to be an inevitable tendency to complicate fun with gear and technical gadgetry.Play is beginning to look more and more like a kind of work."There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats," said Toad in "The Wind in the Willows."

THE WORK OF NATIONS:PREPARING OURSELVES FOR21ST CENTURY CAPITALISM.Robert B. Reich.Knopf.331 pages. $24.Now that patriotism is resurging, two leading automakers are boasting that their cars are built in the U.S.A. Honda's ads promote its new Accord wagon as "the amazing new car from Ohio," while Nissan's praises the "all-new, American-built Sentra."If you're puzzled by Japanese-owned companies waving the red, white and blue, read Robert Reich's insightful analysis of a global economy where a car with an American nameplate might have an engine built in Japan, styling designed in West Germany, smaller components made in Taiwan and advertising written in Britain.