Word: basic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...which pinpoints a lack of formal property rights as a main culprit behind the developing world’s stagnation. Like his compatriot, Vargas Llosa heaps praise on the ingenuity of Latin America’s poorest, especially the shantytown residents who have organized to provide basic services to the disenfranchised. Still, he considers them incapable of generating the sort of structural change key to breaking the region’s cycle of misery...
...interview after the event, Shakir said, “Without a basic understanding of what a divestment actually entailed, no discussion or debate can really take place...
...people doing nothing at all. He was even able to re-create the effect in his lab. He found that about 45% of people in his experiment shut down (that is, stopped moving or speaking for 30 sec. or often longer) when asked under pressure to perform unfamiliar but basic tasks. "They quit functioning. They just sat there," Johnson remembers. It seemed horribly maladaptive. How could so many people be hard-wired to do nothing in a crisis...
Energy is a two-edged sword in this connection. Affordable, reliable energy is essential for meeting basic human needs and for powering economic growth. But the energy technologies we use today are responsible for a large share of the biggest environmental threats to human well-being. Energy is responsible for most indoor and outdoor air pollution, most of the acidification of rainfall caused by human activities, most of the oil polluting the seas, most radioactive waste, and much of the environmental burden of toxic trace metals...
Imagine a whip-smart economist with a sprawling imagination. Now imagine he's 9 years old and wants to know everything. That is the basic profile of Steven Levitt. A University of Chicago economist, Levitt, 37, is in fact an adult. But he has built his name by asking questions packed with curiosity and devoid of judgment: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their moms? Did crime in the 1990s go down because the number of abortions in the 1970s went up, or is that just a coincidence? Does parenting actually matter when...