Word: new
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Companies go belly-up all the time, but in this decade there were an inordinate number of bankruptcies. The creative destruction of the Internet had a part in this. While the Web opened up new worlds and created thousands of jobs at Amazon, Google and the like, it displaced workers at travel and government agencies, at newspapers and magazines and at stores like Circuit City and Tower Records - traditional distribution points for services, information and goods. Economists call that disintermediation. (See pictures of retailers that have gone out of business...
...what about the Hurricane Katrina debacle? An act of God, right? Not really. When the storm raced toward New Orleans in late August 2005, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration feared the worst. For years they had been warning the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the city's 350 miles of levees, that its system was inadequate. The scientists wanted the Corps to revise the Standard Project Hurricane, a model that determines how extensive the levees should be. For instance, the Corps did not consider the tendency of soil to sink over time, and it excluded...
...more pictures of New Orleans...
Serwer is the managing editor of Fortune. To find more of Serwer's insights into the next decade, look for our new TIME book, Starting Over: Why the last decade was so damn rotten and why the next one will surely be better. Available at time.com/startingoverbook...
...With reporting by Beth Kowitt / New York...