Word: scale
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...grand scale, that's what the Federal Government is doing--using windfall tax receipts to cut the national debt by a record $185 billion this quarter. The interest savings, in effect, provide a reserve for bumpy times--notably when baby boomers start drawing heavily from the Social Security system in about 15 years. The government doesn't often shine when it comes to budget matters. But in this case, Congress's lead is worth emulating...
...moving backward (in modern Zimbabwe, to take but one example, the average life expectancy has dwindled from 70 to 38 in recent years because of AIDS). To travel today is to see a planet that looks more and more like a too typical downtown on a global scale: a small huddle of shiny high-rises reaching toward a multinational heaven, surrounded on every side by a wasteland of the poor, living in a state of almost biblical desperation...
With its vast scale, China can upset the global trading rules and security understandings that underwrite the current Western-led system. China's problems with economy, energy and the environment will be the world's problems, because if they are not taken care of, terrible consequences will spill across the map far from China. Perversely, the gap in material wealth and military technology separating China from the West is actually a source of leverage for Beijing. In the West the gap makes China look weak. But the gap actually makes China strong. China has the advantage--the underdog's advantage...
...world is going through more fundamental change than it has in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The head economist at Sandia National Laboratories, Arnold Baker, said it's the "biggest change since the cavemen began bartering." Do you want to be a player, a full-scale participant who embraces change? Here is the opportunity to participate in the lovely, messy playground called "Let's reinvent the world...
Surely tomorrow's giants will come from the sectors that are revolutionizing business, no? They well may. But remember the stupendous scale we're talking about: combining IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, for example, wouldn't even come close to hitting our $200 billion mark. That fact points up a hard truth about corporate size. Infotech--or telecommunications or entertainment--may well be the world's largest industry in coming decades, but that doesn't mean it will harbor the world's largest company...