Word: amitai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some commentators on American behavior think that today's sporadic hoarding of gasoline is an isolated phenomenon unlikely to spread to other products. Says Sociologist Amitai Etzioni: "People have a very emotional stake in their cars. It's not rational and subject to the usual calculations." But others view it more seriously. Says Harvard Historian Frank Freidel: "Hoarding is an absolutely typical American trait...
Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni agrees that the weakening of traditional standards could have dangers. Says he: "No political society has ever survived without its nuclear family intact. We can't go on becoming more and more liberal. We can't go on becoming ever more tolerant and pulling the nuclear family apart...
...Some worry about the social and cultural implications of a markedly older population. By the year 2020 there will be almost twice as many people over 65 (43 million) as there are today, exerting immense new pressures on the Social Security, pension and Medicare systems. To Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, "ZPG spells a decadent society, a la France in the '30s, a la Berlin in the early '30s. This means a less innovative society, a society in which fewer people will have to attend, care, feed, house and pay for a larger number...
...neither the futurists nor their adherents have ever been able to agree on a unified vision. The fault may lie not with the stargazers, but with the public. As Columbia University Sociologist Amitai Etzioni observes: "Too often we oscillate between blind faith and cynical contempt for futurologists. It might help to realize that like other professionals, their qualities vary; and while the more reputable ones are in evitably better than no help at all, no one owns a clear crys tal ball...
...macho world of CB is part soap and part horse opera. Says Amitai Etzioni, the eminent Columbia University sociologist: "A CB allows you to present a false self: to be beautiful, masculine, tall, rich, without being any of those things. Like the traveling salesman who drops into a singles bar and says he's the president of his company, a person can project on the air waves anything he wants to be." The person who installs a CB set and adopts a "handle" (nickname) and starts "modulating" on the air, is creating a character and reaching out to others...