Word: technocrat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like all men and women who survive and flourish in public life, Yeltsin has evolved and matured, changing from an ambitious technocrat to an energetic, near bullying party boss to an impassioned if erratic reformer. Born in 1931 in Sverdlovsk province in the Ural Mountains, he grew up in a family so poor that all six members slept on the floor of a one-room apartment with a goat. His childhood was, he has written, "a fairly joyless time." He was always, he later recalled, "a little bit of a hooligan." When he was 11, he lost the thumb...
...professor introduced a concept that measured the time -- often a matter of milliseconds -- that public figures spend thinking of matters unrelated to themselves. The new novel, his third, explores the equally valuable IRAT, or Index of Irrational Expectations, a quantification of the collective wrongheadedness of the stock market. Harvard technocrat Montgomery Marvin, known for his seminal study of refrigerator pricing, invents IRAT and becomes exceedingly rich. He thus affronts the self-satisfied Cambridge community, where "no one has ever been known to repeat what he or she has heard at a party, only what he or she has said." This...