Word: overshoot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...movements overshoot," Riesman says, but adds that "this movement has not achieved its goals and will not succeed until there are as many women, percentage wise, majoring in chemistry at MIT, as there are men." Riesman is right. Look around at the meager number of tenured women at Harvard--there are only eleven. Read the polls which tell you there are fewer college-educated women entering the job market than men without college educations. The women's movement has certainly publicized its cause, but seems to be sinking into quicksand along the road somewhere...
...villain is "exponential growth" at a regular annual percentage. Each year's growth yields a bigger absolute increase because it is applied to a larger base; the result is that growth accelerates rapidly, like compound interest. In the M.I.T. computers, exponential growth showed a terrifying tendency to "overshoot and collapse." The study asserts that if the world's population continues to grow at about 2% annually, and global industrial output expands about 7% a year (as they do now), then some time during the life span of children born today, the world will begin running out of natural...
This reliance on plausible generalities when operational specifics are so sorely needed undercuts the value of the whole book. DeRopp is a very articulate man who usually has the good sense not to technically overshoot the vocabulary of the lay reader. But outside of recounting some enlightening but esoteric anecdotes, he really does little more than crystallize a sense that experience has given...