This has been a hard year for those who make, or think about, economic policy. In January, the official forecast of the Council of Economic Advisers was that Gross National Product for 1966 would be $722 billion, plus or minus $5 billion (though I suspect that in their capacity as technicians they would have preferred a somewhat higher number even then). It now looks as if the actual figure for the year will be in the neighborhood of $740 billion. The discrepancy is not quite as big as it looks, because perhaps $6 billion of it represents a purely statistical revision of the data. But it is still big enough to make a difference.