Word: 1950s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some MIT professors in the 1950s started studying energy efficient home designs, sharing their research with anyone who would listen. The federal government didn't do much listening until the oil crisis in the 70s, and then started listening very carefully. The Carter Administration offered now-notorious tax breaks for new homes fitted with solar devices...
...some time. The Justice Department says that 83% of all Americans will be victims of a violent crime at least once in their lives. Forty years ago, there were three cops for every violent felony. Today there are 3.3 violent felonies for each officer. Returning the ratio to its 1950s level should be a first priority, and a first step is to break out and pass two provisions of the crime bill currently stalled in Congress. One would provide about $1 billion in extra law-enforcement assistance to local areas. An environment of disorder -- broken windows, graffiti, shoplifting -- threatens civility...
...FOOD GUIDE PYRAMID, ERECTED LAST week by the Agriculture Department, looks like a perfect update of the good old four-food-groups diagrams kids have been seeing in school cafeterias since the 1950s. The chart reorganizes edibles into five groups, graphically illustrating the latest nutritional correctness: bread and pasta are great for you, so eat lots; fruits and vegetables are good; meats, dairy products, beans and nuts are O.K.; and fats and sweets are trouble, not even a full-fledged group, and should be squeezed into the smallest possible corner of the diet...
...British philosopher Bertrand Russell said in the 1950s that the Australians' laconic mode of living could "point the way to a happier destiny for man throughout the centuries to come." Australians may finally be developing the sort of culture that could match Russell's utopian vision. They are waking up to the fact that they are not so much isolated as irrevocably enmeshed in a new society -- neither totally European nor Asian nor Aboriginal but containing elements of all three -- that is just being born. The promise is that unlike much of the rest of the world, Australia...
America's road system is a marvel and a mess. With 3.9 million miles of highways and roads, many of them built in the asphalt rush of the 1950s, it is by far the world's biggest system. Ninety percent of all U.S. travel occurs on highways, and three-quarters of all domestic goods are shipped by road. No stretches are busier than the 1.2 million miles of interstate and other major highways. And yet, despite the $28 billion spent each year on maintenance and construction, the Federal Highway Administration admits that 52% of these thoroughfares are in miserable condition...