Word: modernizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...loan clubs are descendants of communal arrangements that originated centuries ago. In many countries, groups of people have long pooled their cash to allow members to bury their dead or to celebrate marriages. Modern-day clubs retain much of that social flavor. In a 1981-83 study of 50 people in Mexican and Mexican-American tandas (turns), Carlos Velez-Ibanez, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, found that 17% cited family obligations such as weddings, baptisms and funerals as reasons for their participation. Each gathering of a keh, notes Sungsoo Kim, president of the Korean-American Small Business Center...
This makes the concept of modern markets hard to understand and difficult to explain, even for the distinguished explainer Martin Mayer. Following an arcane account of a portfolio-hedging strategy, he writes, "You can read it twice, or three times, or you can take my word for it." Which is sound advice. Mayer has been one of the educated layman's best guides to the covert worlds of Wall Street and finance. The Bankers (1974) was a best seller. More recent books include The Fate of the Dollar (1980) and The Money Bazaars...
Atlanta now has the standard characteristics of a national city. Travelers arriving in its vast, ultra-modern airport are guided on what seems like an almost endless journey toward the outside world by a disembodied voice that speaks standard American English -- the Southern woman who recorded it having been instructed to purge her speech of any cornpone connotations. It can match just about any Northern city in the splendor of its high-rises or the poverty of those who are sometimes spoken of as living "in the shadow of the buildings." The white residents of most of its neighborhoods have...
...national city, Atlanta is now so removed from the rest of the state that you sometimes hear talk of "two Georgias" -- meaning modern prosperous Atlanta and backward, impoverished everything else. Atlanta is free at last. The traces of a Georgia town -- a big Georgia town, but still a Georgia town -- are gradually disappearing, as the suburban office parks fill up with Yankees. Even people who sound like they might be from Georgia seem to be disappearing. Atlanta magazine ran a story called The Vanishing Southerner -- a character who can be heard, as he fades away, grumbling that all the places...
...being liberated from the South really was to live in someplace that isn't anywhere at all. Late in the evening, after a few drinks, they are likely to say that Atlanta has no soul. I asked the novelist Pat Conroy, who lives there, why there is no modern novel that portrays Atlanta in the way that The Moviegoer and A Confederacy of Dunces portray New Orleans. "It's hard to write 400 pages about white bread," he said...