Word: home
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Dubai's problems stem from its huge - and hubristic - ambition. The Gulf emirate, which unlike the other emirates that join to form the U.A.E., has little oil or gas, and so has concentrated on building itself up as a vibrant business and transport hub and the home to some of the world's biggest, flashiest and most modern real estate. To lure in the masses, Dubai promoted itself as an income tax free resort for the world's rich and upper middle class. Dubai's master planners developed a signature over-the-top style geared to the tastes of newly...
...February, oil-rich Abu Dhabi, home to the U.A.E.'s rulers, stepped in with $10 billion to prop up its ailing neighbor. Abu Dhabi could step in again, though next time it will probably demand a greater say in the way Dubai Inc. operates. (Read: "Abu Dhabi: An Oil Giant Dreams Green...
...have this cycle we've developed-work intensively, buy more, repeat," says Carolyn Danckaert, New American Dream's director of home and communities programs. "At a certain point, the accumulation of stuff starts to drive your life." As Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College who helps run the group, points out in her book The Overworked American, when workers became more productive over the second half of the 20th century, we as a society chose to take the benefit as more stuff. We could have also decided to, say, work a little less...
...Ellen Ruppel Shell devotes the better part of two chapters to how inexpensive goods mess with our minds. She describes one experiment in which researchers used brain scans to show that the joy of a discounted item comes before it's bought; by the time a person is at home with his new thing, the luster is gone. On Black Friday, I watched shoppers on TV proudly state how much they were saving on this and that. No one mentioned how much they were spending...
...lured not by money but a determination to do well by this country that had been so long neglected. They started businesses, only to see them fail because of the endemic corruption. They launched NGOs, only to see funding dry up because of apathy back home. They came with hope, but leave with despair. With them they take years of knowledge and experience that can never be replaced. Few of us can look to the future of this country with an expectation that things will improve before they get worse...