Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy.

* Paul Zane Pilzer wants people to look at wealth in an entirely new way. Business is no longer a zero-sum game, he SayS, it's a world of unlimited resources, of unlimited wealth. One person's benefit is no longer another's loss.

In Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy (Crown, 226 pp., $19.95), Mr. Pilzer explains how today's billionaires will not earn their bucks by making an existing product cheaper and more easily available-as Henry Ford did with the automobile. Rather they'll create their wealth by producing goods and services that did not exist at the time of their birth-e.g., Sam Walton with automated distribution, Ross Perot with data processing, Steve Jobs with personal computers.

Mr. Pilzer applies this market has no comers" theory to many of the nation's ailments. Allow parents to choose which school their child will attend, and educators will be forced to provide cheaper, more efficient, more up-to-date methods of teaching. The voucher argument, essentially.

The same applies to child care: Parents choose where their child will be watched; government pays the bill. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad can work, creating more goods and wealth. As with education, Mr. Pilzer argues, the relatively small sums spent on the very young are more than redeemed later in the beneficiary's life when he becomes a productive member of society.

Which all sounds dandy indeed. But by the time you've arrived at the first line of the last chapter-Let's review the theory of Alchemy . . "-You begin to envy Sisyphus. Over and over he repeats his chorus: It's no longer a zerosum game, the world has unlimited resources, the future grows ever brighter, and so on. It's not that what Mr. Pilzer says is wrong. The problem lies in his failure to go beyond the obvious and apply his ideas in more concrete terms.

To take just one of many intricacies Mr. Pilzer could have dealt with more thoroughly, consider the voucher proposal. Public schools spend about twice as much as parochial schools per student. One can therefore infer that because public schools have a monopoly on state and federal funds, they are not naturally inclned to be as efficient as private schools, which must continue to perform well so that students continue to enroll.

But an annual expenditure of, say, $5,000 per pupil in public schools is an average of aggregate spending. That is, if it costs a certain public school $5 million a year to educate one thousand students, the average cost per student is $5,000. But if fifty of those students are drawn away to a better school under a voucher plan, the public school will not spend $250,000 ($5,000 for each of the departing fifty students) less annually. It will continue to spend close to the $5 million, because of the fixed bureaucratic overhead, money not spent in the classroom.

In order for the cost of vouchers to be not simply added to the nation's educational expenditures, a voucher system cannot effectively exist along with public schools-that is, schools run by the state. A working voucher system would entail the private sector's running all the schools and the state's supplying the funds. The voucher is a great idea, which would give the education establishment a real incentive to care more about teaching and less about political infighting, but it would wind up costing more money.

Mr. Pilzer has a good theory that has implicitly become part of modem economic thinking, and he felt explication was in order. It still is.