Word: 1940s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...billion of goods and services the feds buy every year is governed by rules that generally require centralized buying, in bulk, and after many approvals (an average of 23 signatures on each government printing order, by one calculation). That system may have had some advantages in the 1940s, but it is out of tune with modern markets. Buying a computer, for example, takes about a year for a desktop model, up to three years for a mainframe. Employees at Internal Revenue Service headquarters in Atlanta and many other government offices complain that their computers are usually obsolete by the time...
...historian knows that crime waves, in fact, are cyclical. Earlier ones occurred in the 1830s, the late 1860s and the 1920s. The question is, What causes the cycles, and what affects their timing? Crime was abnormally low in the 1940s and 1950s and began to rise around 1963 and peaked in the late 1970s. The increase in crime from 1963 to 1980 was enormous -- and it occurred in a period of general prosperity. Part of the explanation is that the population got younger, because of the baby boom -- and younger men are more likely to commit crime than older ones...
...economic explosion, we have had a crime explosion. I think the two are indissolubly entwined. When that prosperity puts cars, drugs and guns into the hands of even relatively poor 18-year-olds, young people can do a great deal more damage today than they could in the 1940s or 1950s...
Political fashions drift from left to right. The enthusiastic sectarian style of American communists during the 1930s and 1940s traveled with the neoconservatives when they washed ashore as immigrants to the land of conservatism during the 1970s and 1980s. The rallying cry of race-blind equal opportunity, which was of little interest to right-wingers during the heyday of the civil rights movement, was later taken as the right's own in the struggle over affirmative action. And now, having spent recent years diagnosing a virus of democracy they label "political correctness," some conservatives seem to be succumbing themselves...
...Canadian section of the St. Lawrence River, flanked by both agriculture and industry, whale hunting stopped in the late 1940s. But the population of belugas there has hovered around 500 ever since. Antarctica's stock of blue whales, not hunted since 1966, also hovers at about 500; a half- century ago they were 500 times as numerous...