AbstractsEngineering

Pg. 66 missing. Today industry is too competitive to remain the shuttlecock of supply and demand. Producing capacity has the potentiality of growing so much faster than its markets that there is the everpresent danger of overexpansion soon to result in the enormous wastes of excess capacity. In the past there was no real problem of coordinating supply and demand. The population was expanding rapidly and the markets growing even faster. Consumer tastes were not particularly discriminating, and by and large there was insufficient producing capacity to meet the needs of the market. You simply made what you wanted to make and consumers took i t . Over a period of years the supply never quite caught up to the demand; it was always slightly set back by periods of war and depression when equilibrium was in sight. The situation today is somewhat the same. The tremendous demand created by the curtailment of consumer production during the war is considerably in exfiess of the supply. This provides industry with great temptations of hugh immediate profits to be realized only by the immediate expansion of its productive equipment. [...]