Word: reckoner
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...only safe generalization about long-range population predictions is that they have always proved wrong. When Malthus foresaw mass starvation in Europe unless its people stopped breeding, he failed to reckon with the industrial revolution and the agricultural potential of the Americas. Latter-day players of the Malthusian numbers game, who foresee global economic ruin in one, two or six centuries, usually fail to reckon sufficiently on the unknowable potentialities of science and the unpredictable turn of events. Says the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: "With the present rate of increase, it can be calculated that...
After a tour of duty in Washington in what seemed an innocuous job, Poland's Colonel Pawel Monat returned to Warsaw in May of last year. In the half-world of intrigue, he was a man to reckon with. His next official job was to coordinate the work of all military attaches in Polish embassies throughout the world, which, in a Communist country, meant that Monat had access to political as well as military intelligence and espionage, and presumably knew all there was to be known. Hard-working and trusted, Monat apparently had no trouble last summer getting permission...
...very beginning upon special police protection? To this, the usually incisive Mitterrand offered a variety of answers: there was not time; he did not propose to be an informer; he was afraid for the safety of his sons. "Now that I look back," he summed up cryptically, "I reckon that I must have been teleguided and intoxicated...
Russian became more than a power to reckon with; it was a nation that Americans needed desperately to study and to understand. Academic circles realized that American scholarship in the Russian field had been sporadic, disorganized and incomplete. And thus, in the spring of 1947, the Carnegie Corporation proposed the establishment of a program in Russian studies which would lay additional stress on the often neglected areas of psychology and anthropology...
...victory that Macmillan brought off was of the famous kind that made Tories whoop as for Blenheim, Waterloo or Mafeking. "I reckon that 100,000 bottles of bubbly were consumed within an area of four square miles of London," said a nightclub owner after glittering thousands had danced, drunk and cheered till dawn. The staid London Stock Exchange erupted in an exuberant burst of buying as morning-coated brokers shouted bids at lung-top, stood on chairs to make sure their bids were recognized; industrial shares soared 16.1 points for the biggest rise ever recorded in a single...