(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dear Mr. Statistics: Rookie Secretary of Commerce Barbara Franklin recently stated that if current occupational trends continue, the U.S.A. will have more lawyers than people by the year 2000. I realize that she may have been jesting, but just to be on the safe side, would you calculate when this imbalance might occur and what it would mean for the economy, not to mention the people? -- One of the Latter

Dear One: It appears that Babs jovially overstated the case and yet is on to something. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. lawyer population has fruitfully multiplied at an annual rate of 3.64% and is now some 760,000 strong. Assuming that lawyers' parents continue not to practice birth control and that U.S. law schools maintain output at the same unrelenting pace, and also positing that future population growth comes in at a 0.6% rate (a typical guess), the lawyers would outnumber the people in 2188. At that point, America would have 840 million lawyers and 820 million people, and there would be probable cause for certifying numerous lawyers as not human.

The economic implications of large-scale legal beaglery have fascinated many scholars in recent years. Economist Stephen P. Magee of the University of Texas at Austin is a leading generator of equations relating economic growth to the size of the lawyer population. Examining these two variables in many * different countries, he established a strong negative relationship between them. Magee accepts that lawyers are needed in any modern economy but argues that at some point, which the U.S. reached long ago, additions to the lawyer population become a drag on growth. His equations state firmly that in 1990, the U.S. had about 262,000 excess lawyers (about one-third of the total), and they were collectively reducing GNP by $220 billion (around 4%). Further increments are calculated to reduce GNP by $2.5 million a year per lawyer. Also evidencing interest in antilawyer regressions is William A. Niskanen Jr., formerly a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ron and now chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute. His equations too kick out estimates showing that each additional lawyer is associated with a subtraction of $2.5 million from GNP. Unlike vengeful Mr. Statistics, Niskanen does not blame the lawyers themselves for this subtraction, only the litigious social arrangements leading to their employment. In calculating the future effect of the lawyer population on economic growth, we begin by again projecting lawyer growth at 3.64% per annum and assume ''normal'' economic growth at a rate of 2.5% a year, roughly the average for the past two decades. Next we subtract from this rate a percentage representing the excess one-third multiplied by $2.5 million per head. The results of this exercise are quite extraordinary. Within a mere hundred years, we have a gross national product of minus $1.25 quadrillion in today's prices -- a figure that looks bad for the people and maybe even the lawyers.