AT first glance, it is hard to see why Fred Hirseh’s Social Limits to Growth* has been taken so seriously by so many reviewers.  It reads for all the world like the ill-tempered musings of an aging banker, delayed in a Friday afternoon traffic jam on his way to the Hamptons: Life was so much pleasanter before there were all these cars on the road, when the beaches weren’t so crowded, when father could take the well-staffed parlor car on the Long Island Rail Road instead of having to drive the Long Island Expressway.