2024-08-08
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Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money summer school, economic history of the world.
Considered a master's degree, you can literally do with your eyes closed.
In fact, it's better with your eyes closed because in your mind you can meet the economic geniuses, the crafty idealists and the greedy raconteurs that created the economy we have today.
This is lesson five, the rise and fall of free trade.
I'm Robert Smith.
Trade between nations.
Well, it started before there were nations.
In prehistoric archaeological digs, we find evidence that early humans somehow obtained stones and shells from faraway places.
Trade has come up in all of the episodes of summer school so far.
One of the early uses of money was to make trade easier.
Trade was responsible for the birth of companies in the stock market, and trade was the lifeblood of the early United States.
But over the last few hundred years, governments have placed more and more regulations on trade.
Nations had to figure out whether they should encourage buying from other nations or should they try to protect their own industries.
Those questions are playing out in politics even today.
We'll have just one story today about the history of free trade and helping us understand all the moving parts is our economics professor for this lesson, Gordon Hansen from the Harvard Kennedy School.