Inflation is partly the consequence of the inefficiencies of bureaucracy in the knowledge sector of the economy - the vast assortment of credit-collection agencies, financial institutions, banks, life insurance companies and credit-card issuers. It is also caused by market concentration in certain goods-fabricating areas like the steel and automobile industries. During the 1950's and 1960's, when the going was comparatively good, giants like General Motors and United States Steel cheerfully negotiated inflationary settlements with their unions and passed their costs on to the customers. Large companies still suffer the effects of multiple layers of management whose salaries the customers also pay. For managers afflicted by the declining qua lity of products and services and the disaffection of their employees, computers, word processors and the other exotic equipment of the contemporary specialist in paper often seem a cure - a substitution of infallible machinery for distinctly fallible men and wom en. But, as Mr. Harris emphasizes, computers must be programmed, information must be prepared for their manipulation, and the printouts they spit out must be interpreted by humans. ''Sorry, the computer is down'' rivals''Your check is in the mail'' in its capacity to evoke instant derision.

Declining growth rates are the consequence to be expected. Well before OPEC revised the global pecking order, the American economy had begun to falter. For Mr. Harris, the results have been momentous. Slow growth called a halt to the postwar baby boom and sent hordes of women into the labor market in search of the additional income needed to maintain standards of living aspired to or already attained. Like an economist, Mr. Harris argues that married couples now evaluate the costs and benefits of having babies much as they debate other optional commodities.

Employers eagerly hired women because they were literate, obedient to male instruction and willing to work for 40 percent less than men. The women's movement, avers Mr. Harris, amounts to rebellion against flagrant inequity in the labor market and outrageous expectations on the part of husbands that wives will work all day, clean and cook at night and pamper their mates into the bargain.

A subsequent chapter relates how these changes affected homosexuals in this country. Homosexuality has occurred in all societies, says Mr. Harris, but American resistance to it declined in step with the diminished popularity of children. Homosexuals won a measure of acceptance from the community at large because the country had already turned against procreation as the only legitimation of sexuality.

Meanwhile, women competed with blacks for jobs in the burgeoning information industries. By preferring women, employers closed the door to black youths, consigned them to permanent unemployment as an urban underclass and channeled them into crime as the best of career opportunities.