Word: dearth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Desk Dearth can cause dizziness, disorientation, and even anomie. A few young office nomads persevere and are granted use of the receptionist's desk, perhaps during the congressionally mandated National Executive Assistant Awareness Week...
...soon begin to reverse as work-force demographics change. A shortage of workers owing to the low birthrates of the '60s and early '70s is already being felt by employers who try to hire youths for entry-level jobs. Columbia University Professor David Lewin predicts that as the birth dearth works through the ranks of the labor force, "employees are going to have the upper hand in bargaining power." Job insecurity will subside, he thinks, and workers will win higher wages, lowering the pressure to put in more hours...
...ancient scold, with a new Jeremiah sounding the doom cry. Ben J. Wattenberg, a demographic analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, warns that the U.S. and other Western nations are not producing babies fast enough. Since 1957, writes Wattenberg in his new book The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), the average American woman's fertility rate has dropped from 3.77 children to 1.8 -- below the 2.1 size needed to maintain the present population level. Meanwhile, he argues, Communist-bloc nations are producing at a rate of 2.3 children per mother, while the Third World rate is rising...
Other cities, like New York and Detroit, face a similar problem, but it is most acute in the Los Angeles area. Steep rentals and a dearth of public housing have combined with a surging population to push people into makeshift shelters. Some fear that, given the fact that poverty is slowly increasing in the U.S. while the quantity of low-cost housing is shrinking, the L.A. trend may be the wave of the future for the nation's working poor...
...reject these promotion bids. "Other universities have 30 to 40 historians permanently. They can take any old bum they want to, and they often do," he said earlier in the year. "We have a small group so we have to be a lot more cautious. Since there's a dearth of talent we have to go slowly...