Word: bootstrapping
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...Rico's problems "unsolvable." The Caribbean island had a rapidly expanding population, few natural resources, hardly any industry, and chronic unemployment that sometimes ran to one-third of the labor force. In 1942, a rising young politician named Luis Munoz Marin organized a self-help program called Operation Bootstrap; a few years later, as Governor, he invited U.S. companies south, offering them political stability plus wide tax advantages and a vast reservoir of eager-to-learn labor. Ever since, Puerto Rico's economy has been one long, steady success story...
...first ten years tripled the island's gross national product to $1 billion; the next ten raised it to $2 billion. Last week, totting up the figures after 21 years of Munoz and Bootstrap, Puerto Rico's Economic Development Administration could report a breakthrough to a G.N.P. of $2.2 billion. Unemployment is down to 12.8%, and while the population grows by 2.4% each year, per capita income is now $740 annually -low by U.S. standards, but still the second highest in Latin America, surpassed only by oil-rich Venezuela. Things are so much better that migration of Puerto...
...exhilarated. He is excited by "humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic 19th century into the dynamic, abstract 20th century." He feels that there is an "important reorientation of mankind, from the role of an inherent failure, as erroneously reasoned by Malthus, and erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored custodians of civilization's processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success." He is sure the whole world can be fed, housed and happy, if designers can just put to work all the world's skills with Fuller-like efficiency. He is endlessly...
Fortunately, Pitts is an expert on bootstrap operations. His penniless father, a Georgia tenant farmer, raised eight children on peas and corn bread and dreamed of educating all of them. Pitts arrived at Negro Paine College in 1934 with $13 in his pocket, worked his way washing dishes. After two years he went blind. At length he recovered sight in one eye and quit college to "keep school" in Milan, Ga., for $47.50 a month. He saved money, but his father borrowed it-$50 here, $100 there. One day, urging him to finish college, his father produced all the "borrowed...
...Such bootstrap improvement is not always possible, for many towns are simply too small, too poor, and too far gone. As some experts see it, the answer is for small towns to join together in larger economic and administrative units. Working together, several neighboring small towns could provide schools and other public facilities that they could not otherwise afford; instead of competing with one another for new industries, they could work out joint development plans...