As a result, California's growth rate dropped during the 1970's, to 18.5 percent--little more than two thirds the 1960's growth figure and considerably below that of other Western states.Unlike most of the world's volcanoes, they are not always found at the boundaries of the great drifting plates that make up the earth's surface; on the contrary, many of them lie deep in the interior of a plate.
Last year Mitsuo Setoyama, who was then education minister, raised eyebrows when he argued that liberal reforms introduced by the American occupation authorities after World WarII had weakened the "Japanese morality of respect for parents".
Economists have been particularly surprised by favorable inflation figures in Britain and the United States, since, conventional measures suggest that both economies, and especially America's, have little productive slack.The most thrilling explanation is, unfortunately, a little defective. Some economists argue that powerful structural changes in the world have upended the old economic models that were based upon the historical link between growth and inflation.
If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in turn will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product.In the American economy, the concept of private property embraces not only the ownership of productive resources but also certain rights, including the right to determine the price of a product or to make a free contract with another private individual.
At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight--issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones.
Much of the language used to describe monetary policy, such as "steering the economy to a soft landing" of "a touch on the brakes" , makes it sound like a precise science. Nothing could be further from the truth. Economists have been particularly surprised by favorable inflation figures in Britain and the United States, since, conventional measures suggest that both economies, and especially America's, have little productive slack.
