Word: centrality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...economists began discussing things that the West would understand: bonuses and reinvestment, free prices and the need for incentives, even the accumulation of wealth-once a heretical thought under "egalitarian" Communism. Quite independently of one another, the prophets of profit began coming to the same conclusion: rigid Stalinist-style central planning must cease...
Soviet reinvestment-on building the machine tools (and weapons) that the Soviets needed. Stalinist-minded Czech central planners (called "oxen" by many Czechs) blithely pumped billions of kroner in subsidies into moribund enterprises in order to make their master plans come true on paper. By 1963, Czech economic growth, which had been booming at 8% in 1949, had skidded to nothing-indeed, it actually was in decline, an unheard-of event in a planned economy...
Last week Czech economists were putting the finishing touches on an economic reform program designed to rectify that disastrous situation. It shatters the rigidity of central planning, establishes realistic prices and eliminates subsidies, forces each Czech factory to pay its own way or close down. In its sweep and good sense, it transcends any other reform plan in Eastern Europe...
...allows. "The central plan will make only a rough estimate. The previous system was nonsensical precisely because it tried to determine future trends without knowing what the technological trends would be." Now central planners will only advise the banks about the climate of investment to guide them in their credit policies. Instead of handing out fat subsidies as in the past, the Czech central bank will charge 6% interest on capital loans-a price that should "make plant managers all the more concerned to develop in the right direction. Already the Czechs have established Western-style business-administration schools...
...their opening sentences on articles on Minnesota. "Minnesota is one of the chief food-producing states in the United States," says World Book. "Nature has been good to Minnesota. It has given the state many resources for work and play," carols Compton's. "Minnesota is a north-central state near the center of North America," states Britannica. "A train of two-wheeled carts screeched and rumbled along the dusty trail," coaxes Book of Knowledge. Britannica's brevity shows in its listing of well-known Minnesotans; it is the only book of the four that fails to list either...