we asked analyst richard gill what our economic past may imply about the future. during her industrial revolution, great britain was running out of forests. she responded by shifting to a coal technology. production increased many times over. that has been the story of modern economic growth. we see it today in metals like copper and energy sources like oil. this scenario isn't accidental. it is built into the way the market mechanism works. we have first a growing shortage of some resource. its price goes up, setting in motion a series of responses. first, it becomes profitable to try to find more-- we getdded supply. it becomes advisable to use as little of this resource as possible-- we get conservation. thirdly, it becomes desirable to focus our scientific and technological attention on developing new products and means of production that use other resources-- alternative technologies. historically, there is little doubt about the matter. responses have not only met the resource shortage problem, but have overshot the mark by a great margin, leading to increas

we'll examine thatuestion with the help of economic analyst richard gill on this edition of economicsi'm david schoumacher. we can all enjoy the benefits of public services such as museums, schools, and highways, but they have to be paid for. they are, usually in the form of taxes. why must the government provide these services? why can't we rely instead on the free market? it's a controversial question, as we see in the case of private utilities versus the tva. the great mississippi flood as we of 1927the case left 800,000 homeless. swelling waters overran levees throughout the tennessee river and into the mississippi, turning northern louisiana into an inland sea. secretary of commerce herbert hoover called the flood the greatest peacetime calamity in the history of the country. the disaster was predictable. the mississippi had flooded before. local authorities attempted to pvide flood control, but with uneven efforts. the levee system is oy as strong as its weakest link. the building of dams could have prevented the flood. some legislators wanted to use federal funds. but they face

with the help of economics analyst richard gill, we'll examine that question on this edition of "economics." i'm david schoumacher. it is only in recent years that exchange rates could vary from day to day. for generations, exchange rates were fixed and currencies freely convertible to gold. to cast aside the predictability of the fixed exchange rate system was considered more than unusual -- it was nearly unthinkable. why then, in 1933, would the united states do the unthinkable? why would it abandon the stability of the gold standard? before the great war, the gold standard symbolized stability and prosperity, and the british pound was considered "as good as gold." but in 1925, parliament set the exchange rate of the pound for gold beyond its real value. as a result, british goods became more expensive -- exports declined, factory workers were laid off. england's economy began to unravel. in 1931, the government collapsed. a new government broke with tradition. england went off the gold standard and devalued the pound, sacrificing international status for domestic recovery. but for the r

we asked richard gill to comment.re is little question that in the mid-1980s protectionist sentiment was in the air. a suspicion arose in the united states that some foreign countries were using exports to the united states as a means of promoting the domestic growth of their own economies. they were flooding us with their goods while keeping ours out. this suspicion were based on the existence of very high tariffs abroad, it would be fairly easy to evaluate. unfortunately, most of the obstacles that countries place in the way of foreign imports are more subtle than that, what economists call "non-tariff barriers" to trade. government subsidies, as in the case of steel, are sometimes overt, sometimes hidden and complex. complicated licensing and import procedures, special regulations concerning the standards, specifications, and testing that imported products have to meet. the magnitude of such barriers is very difficult to assess. what can be said with some confidence is that countries who are running huge trade surp