Word: upperworld
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...underground economy reflects a troubling shift in American attitudes. So many people are fed up with inflation and high taxes that they no longer feel morally obligated to obey tax laws. Reports TIME Correspondent John Tompkins, who has covered organized crime for many years: "The underworld and the upperworld have converged in their morality over the past several decades. The underworld has not moved over to us, but we have moved in its direction." The victims, of course, are the honest taxpayers, who will have to fork over more and more to carry the load of the connivers and chiselers...
Quality Control. All of this leads, inevitably, to the same problem that befuddles federal regulatory agencies in the upperworld: Does bigness mean badness? Or, as Schelling puts it, "Should crime be organized or disorganized?" In the case of abortion, for example, Schelling admits that "one can wish it were better organized. A large organization could impose higher standards. It would have an interest in quality control and the protection of its 'good will' that the petty abortionist is unlikely to have." Puzzles Schelling: "If the alternative is 'disorganized crime,' the answer is not easy...
...good many economic and business principles that operate in the "upperworld" must, with suitable modification for change in environment, operate in the underworld as well, just as a good many economic principles that operate in an advanced competitive economy operate as well in a socialist or a primitive economy...
Since Aldous Huxley wrote Antic Hay in 1923, fair-minded U. S. readers may have felt that the English upper classes were getting a raw deal in modern English fiction. The works of Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank and lesser observers of the upperworld contain few characters above the rank of a knight or above the ?5,000-a-year income level who are untouched by insipidity, depravity, or both. This week the far less satiric Sylvia Thompson (The Hounds of Spring) contributed another long, episodic novel depicting some unsavory doings among the best people. Since Recapture the MOON...
...bitter mayoral primary election in which he and his activities had become a hot campaign issue between Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson and Judge John Homer Lyle, candidates for the Republican nomination. Ducking out of sight into his underworld, he supervised his "political interests" while in the upperworld sheriffs were deputized, American Legionaries recruited to preserve order. Judge Lyle challenged the police to serve his vagrancy warrant on Capone as the city's No. 1 Public Enemy...
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