September 11, 1994

MORE than 200 years ago, the economist Adam Smith wrote about how the "invisible hand" of the free market produced certain unexpected beneficial economic effects. Watching how peace has unexpectedly broken out in the Middle East, South Africa and even Northern Ireland in the last 12 months, one is tempted to ask whether Adam Smith's invisible hand isn't busy producing certain beneficial political effects as well. Is it simply a coincidence that the three most irreconcilable ethnic conflicts on the face of the earth have all taken giant steps toward reconciliation at the same time? Or have Afrikaners and black South Africans, Arabs and Jews, Protestants and Catholics all been compelled to beat their swords into plowshares simultaneously by economic forces acting on each of them in different ways?

TO lure shoppers out of the malls and back to their communities merchants and the owners of commercial properties are increasingly willing to tax themselves and form business improvement districts to save their downtowns. But in some communities proposals to establish business districts are meeting resistance, and experts debate whether districts are an economic tool for every community.

AUTOMOTIVE engineers have long known that cars do their most serious polluting right after they are started, before their catalytic converters warm up. "Three-quarters of hydrocarbon emissions come out of the tailpipe in the first two minutes," says Joe Kubsh, an engineer in Novi, Mich., for W. R. Grace, a converter supplier. The idea of electrically heating the converter to make it work faster has been around for several years, but there have been some barriers to development. The first prototypes of electrically heated converters were inconvenient because they required preheating and, because they drew a lot of current, separate batteries.

The flame of optimism that flickered among some union people 24 hours earlier quickly dissipated on the 30th day of the baseball players strike yesterday as the union chief charged that the owners don't want an agreement unless the players bow to their will. Representatives of the two sides held three bargaining sessions on two different matters but made no progress on the salary cap issue that divides them and threatens to force cancellation of the last three weeks of the season and the World Series.

They were lying on the grass once more. Until the very end, everything had seemed so different at Notre Dame Stadium since the painful end of a season in the chill of last November. Sunshine was still visible near the end of a warm, late-summer afternoon. The intense anticipation of the Ron Powlus era was being transformed into the loud, rapid construction of a Fighting Irish legend. Until suddenly, the stark ending was the same, with Notre Dame players sprawled on the turf, while giddy visitors and an onrushing minority from the stands celebrated an unforgettable victory made possible by an unlikely kicking hero.