Word: meager
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...size (181,000 sq. mi.) and population (almost 3 million), Papua New Guinea is roughly equivalent to New Zealand, but there the resemblance ends. The population is scattered among more than 700 tribes, each of which has its own dialect. Most of the people hack out meager livings as subsistence-level farmers in remote rural areas. The country has no railroads and few paved roads, relying for transportation on bush pilots and 476 air strips...
...plans still unfulfilled, a Second Development Decade was decreed, and the growth target upped to 6%. As of 1973, however, only a few of the LDCs, most of them oil exporters, had achieved a 6% growth rate. The rest, with a total population of 1.5 billion, kept a meager 2.8% ahead of the population increase...
...eight days the agony imposed on one of the nation's wealthiest families was intense. The Edgar M. Bronfmans of New York, whose Seagram liquor fortune and other assets exceed $1 billion, feared that 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II was buried in a box with a meager ten-day supply of air and water steadily running out. He had been kidnaped, and the kidnapers had demanded a ransom of $4.6 million, the highest ever asked in the U.S. Frantically the family tried to comply, but hitches kept developing. The wait seemed interminable...
...subtly arguing for is a new kind of rugged individualism. If the lower class is to follow the good path of middle-classification, its members must work hard and forego the sex and action of the streets. They must adopt the Protestant work ethic and not squander their meager pay checks on liquor or drugs. But where is the lower class person to get the job that will give him the chance to put the nose to the grindstone? Only through eliminating minimum wage laws does Banfield say these jobs will be forthcoming...
Communist nations have paid the market the ultimate compliment by trying to introduce elements of market pricing into their own economies, so far with meager success. The trademarks of Communist economies remain indelible: low productivity, shortages of goods, lengthy queues in stores, years-long waits for apartments. In order to spur initiative, most Communist countries also have huge and growing differences in real income (and perquisites) between commissar and collective farmer. Nikita Khrushchev once replied to a charge that the Soviet Union was going capitalist: "Call it what you will, incentives are the only way to make people work harder...