Word: perilous
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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First is the notion that "soil cannot be stretched," that each acre has a certain production capacity (Vogt calls it "biotic potential") which cannot be boosted without dire peril. This is the same fallacy that expresses itself in the old saying, "There are only so many slices in the cake." Some businessmen say this when they decide that their markets cannot be expanded and, therefore, should be divided among them in quotas set by their cartel. Some labor unions decide that there are only so many jobs to be divided, and therefore oppose labor-saving devices...
Such super-isolationism, with hints of the old "yellow peril," is one of the ugliest Implications of Neo-Malthusianism. The world is already overpopulated, the argument goes. Some areas, like the U.S., are luckier than others, but even the U.S. will soon run out of food. Therefore it should not help foreigners. Let them starve now, before they increase their numbers (with our help) and overwhelm...
...sophisticated than her counterparts of the past, but she is no more proof against the "roguery and hypocrisy of seducers." So warned Pope Pius, who explained that the modern girl "believes herself able, with impunity, to read everything, to see everything, to try everything . . . She is disarmed before the peril...
Pamela's parents, whose marital differences have fascinated Chicago newspaper readers almost as much as Pamela's peril, took the operation harder than the patient did. The sight of a routine blood transfusion blacked out father Fred Lamphere. Said he: "I saw them putting needles and blood into her, and I keeled right over in a faint...
...Marshall Plan nations (plus Western Germany) are charged not only with building the framework of European cooperation but with allocations of U.S. help among themselves. If they had shown themselves unable to cope with the problem, the Marshall Plan would have bean in extremely grave peril. In Paris last week, with a sort of corrective lurch like that of a man who slips and regains his balance on an icy sidewalk, the negotiators reached agreement on allocations...