Word: eras
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...progressed spectacularly in spite of a vast, impoverished population and an absence of democracy. China's advantage is its far more homogeneous society and its single-party rule, which can easily suppress any social dissent and move rapidly on any project. Also, China learned the lessons of Mao-era excesses and made necessary course corrections. Similarly India has understood the errors of its socialist beginnings, which suppressed private enterprise in all fields at the cost of developing human resources and infrastructure. But India, too, has made its course correction and the result has been the rapid economic growth of recent...
This is an extremely fashionable topic at the moment. Some cultural observers even think Americans are due for a prolonged shift away from the consumption obsession of the post--World War II era. That strikes me as an iffy bet, but it is clear that the debt-fueled consumer spending binge of the past couple of decades is over. The household debt-to-income percentage more than doubled, from 65% in 1982 to 135% in 2007. That turned out to be way too much for us to handle, and now the leveraging process has gone into reverse. The latest household...
...Great Moderation was a name economists gave to a post-1982 era marked by only two mild recessions and long stretches of uninterrupted growth. That's over, and the transition to whatever comes next will, if history is any guide, be messy. From 1970 to '82, the U.S. economy was hit by four downturns, two of which (1973-75 and 1981-82) until recently competed for the title of "worst since the Great Depression." The current recession has undisputed claim to that title. And while we may be about to climb out of it, don't be surprised...
...raising rates on just the very richest won't be enough. The only alternative is what some call the inflation tax--reducing the relative size of the country's debts by letting prices rise across the board. But that has its costs too. The free-lunch era is over...
...biggest job is the city's biggest township. Soweto is an acronym for South Western Townships, the banal moniker apartheid-era leaders bestowed on the dormitory city they created for blacks on the edge of town. The apartheid government decided blacks had no need for not only freedom, fair wages and a decent education but also roads, trees and houses. Soweto was a place of tin shacks and red dirt. As part of the effort to redress this legacy of inequality, the mayor has repaved Soweto's main roads, and Williamson invented his extreme park missions...