Word: bowens
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When Australia's Physicist Edward G. Bowen first proposed the startling theory that the earth's rainfall is strongly influenced by showers of space dust, most meteorologists howled him down. But Welsh-born Bowen is hard to discourage. For eight years, whenever he could take time from his job as chief of the Radiophysics Division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, he searched for evidence to buttress his argument. He found a hopeful amount, and by last week Physicist Bowen had become something of a meteorological hero. After hearing Bowen talk at the International...
Meteor Streams. Bowen's long study of space dust began back in 1953, when he noticed that certain days of each year had abnormally high rainfall. In his search for an explanation, Bowen quickly eliminated the high and low pressure areas that meteorologists generally blame for rainfall. They appear too irregularly, and they never affect the whole earth in the same way at the same time. Bowen was more intrigued by the streams of meteors that the earth passes through on regular schedule. When he looked up the dates of known meteor showers, he found that they seemed...
Professor Bowen, in his 137-page survey of wages back to 1900, deflates some widely prevalent notions. For one thing, businessmen often blame-and labor leaders credit-the rise of big unions for the fact that wage scales do not drop in a recession. Not so, says Economist Bowen: "The historical evidence shows that wages were by no means perfectly 'flexible' in the days before strong trade unionism made important inroads...
...Declines. In the period since 1900, actual money wages have only declined in eight years-four of them in the Depression (1929-32) when industrial unions were born. With or without unions, says Bowen, "the reluctance of wages to fall in spite of considerable unemployment has been a characteristic of wage behavior throughout the 20th century...
Steady Rise. As might be expected, Bowen found that unions have their greatest impact on wages in boom times rather than in recessions. Nevertheless, in the 35 years of the relatively weak craft union, prior to the Wagner Act in 1935, constant-dollar wages showed a slightly larger percentage increase (from 53? to $1.13 an hour: 114%) than in the 25 years since ($1.13 to $2.20: 95%), when the powerful industrial union has come into its own. Since 1900 the output per man-hour in U.S. manufacturing has risen at an average annual rate of 2%-3% a year. Wage...