Word: bootstrapping
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...chrome-spun nation so rich that its experience can have no relevance to the problems of other peoples. He took a look at Manhattan and Washington. D.C., but was more particularly interested in Arizona's irrigated cotton fields and in Puerto Rico's "Operation Bootstrap," the imaginative economic self-development program designed to pull Puerto Rico out of centuries of poverty...
A.D.L. has put the same resources to work in helping other nations to help themselves. As the planners behind Puerto Rico's highly successful "Operation Bootstrap," the company has helped bring in 450 new plants, creating 36,000 new jobs with an annual $46 million payroll, indirectly created thousands of additional service jobs (TIME...
Failure is not impossible; 107 firms established under Bootstrap have gone broke for assorted reasons. But the successes are notable. A plastics manufacturer who started in 1953 with a $15,000 investment cleared $200,000 last year alone; a 1952 investment of $675,000 netted $2,800,000 in 1955. The average return on capital before taxes is double that of U.S. companies...
...thus making more goods available, Bootstrap has tackled one approach to Puerto Rico's basic problem: overpopulation. More than 2,300,000 cram the island, 670 to the square mile. From the approach of providing work, Bootstrap has been barely a holding operation. It has created 33,000 industrial jobs, and perhaps even more resulting service jobs. But a runaway birth rate combined with a death rate lower than the mainland's-plus a parade of labor from the increasingly efficient farms-pours 20,000 workers a year into the market. In the short run, only by heavy...
Transformation. The pull of Bootstrap has transformed Puerto Rican life; the dejection of the past is lost in new pride. A case in point is Salinas, on the south coast, once a drowsy and impoverished sugar town. In 1952 Paper-Mate opened a ballpoint-pen plant there, hired 400 workers, three-fourths of them women who had never worked before, and began to sprinkle a payroll of $1,250,000 a year over the town. As almost the first result, a jewelry store opened to sell the gold watches Puerto Ricans admire. A market soon developed for used cars, furniture...