Word: 1950s
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...American family life, telling people what they don't want to hear about how they conduct themselves and especially how they raise their kids. Through her books and syndicated radio show (soon to become a TV show), Dr. Laura preaches a reactionary gospel, begging for a return to 1950s family values and dissing the choices of an entire generation--my generation--that wants to "have it all": fabulous careers, love lives and families. Dr. Laura is so ripe for parody that at least two characters on prime-time TV are clearly based on her. It would be easy to dismiss...
...salesclerks would often determine children's shoe size by X-raying their feet. Never mind that the same thing could have been done with a wooden ruler. Fluoroscopes, as the X-ray devices were called, were promoted as the scientific way to guarantee a proper fit. By the mid-1950s, however, it was clear that many fluoroscopes were badly maintained and ended up subjecting customers--not to mention salesclerks--to potentially dangerous amounts of radiation. Soon the machines were banned...
...globalization and military power. We think other countries can have one or the other but not both. This simplistic view, however, forgets even our own history, as well as the history of other rising states. The rise to superpowerdom in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s was accompanied by sharp growth in economic and military power. Each fueled the other. We forget this because as a status quo power we want to freeze a global order that benefits us. We'd much rather hold to the belief that new powers will be only too happy to continue...
...didn't realize we were no longer living in an industrial economy for about 20 years, from the early 1950s to the early '70s. When we finally figured out the old economy had exited, we didn't know what to call the new one. Postindustrial? Service? Shopping and gathering? Information won the title...
...gathering economies ruled for hundreds of thousands of years before they were overshadowed by agrarian economies, which ruled for about 10,000 years. Next came the industrial ones. The first began in Britain in the 1760s, and the first to finish started unwinding in the U.S. in the early 1950s. We're halfway through the information economy, and from start to finish, it will last 75 to 80 years, ending in the late 2020s. Then get ready for the next one: the bioeconomy...