Word: torporous
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...individual initiative and social concern for progress. "What holds back many LDCs is the people who live there," says P.T. Bauer. "Material achievement depends primarily on people's attitudes, motivation and mores. In many LDCs, popular mores are often uncongenial to economic development; there is widespread fatalism and torpor and preference for a contemplative life." For many traditional African societies, work is considered only a means of survival rather than a way to improve one's living standard...
...three weeks before they were found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair. Evidence suggesting that their "confessions" had been coerced slowed the process not a bit. Later investigations strongly suggested that the two men were innocent but by then the local law was back in its familiar subtropical torpor. So it was not until last week, twelve years after they were first locked up, that Pitts and Lee were finally set free...
...that some of the old values and restraints have been battered by recent upheavals?war, riots, assassinations, racial strife, situational ethics, the youth rebellion. As disillusionment sets in, fewer and fewer Americans look to the churches, schools or Washington for moral leadership. Stern observers of today's widespread ethical torpor tend to agree with the 19th century French criminologist Jean Lacassagne: "A society gets the criminals it deserves...
...economists were poets, they would pay more attention to spring. That season of hope and expectation is normally a time for Americans to shake off their winter torpor, get out of the house and spend. Yet when spring began officially last week, consumers were in one of their chilliest moods in many a season...
...than scandal. Its layout is in the British popular mold: narrow columns, small body type, terse stories, a welter of breathless headlines, jumbled boxes and graphics-all suggesting an earthquake in the composing room. Once they get past the frenetic format, American readers may feel let down by the torpor of Star stories...