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ADB: An abbreviation that stands for either the African Development Bank the Asian Development Bank. The African Development Bank is a regional multilateral development institution engaged in promoting the economic development and social progress of its member countries in Africa. The Bank, established in 1964, started functioning in 1966 with its Headquarters in Abidjan, Cote d' lvoire. The Bank borrows funds from the international money and capital markets. Its shareholders are the 53 countries in Africa as well as 24 countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The Asian Development Bank is a multilateral development finance institution dedicated to reducing poverty in Asia and the Pacific that engages in mostly public sector lending for development purposes in its developing member countries. They pursue this goal by helping to improve the quality of people's lives providing loans and technical assistance for a broad range of development activities. ADB raises fund through bond issues on the world's capital markets but they also rely on members' contributions. The ADB was established in 1966 and has its headquarters in Manila, Philippines. As of September of 2003, the ADB had 58 member countries.
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                           DISMAL SCIENCE: A term for the study of economics developed during the late 18th and early 19th century when economists concluded that continued population growth would push wages and living standards to a minimal subsistence level and keep them there. It persists to the present time because economics continue to point out that actions result in opportunity cost, that nothing is free, and that eventually society has to pay the price for what it does. The notion that economics is a dismal science emerged out of the work of several late-18th and early-19th century scholars, most notably Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo.As Malthus, Ricardo, and their contemporaries pioneered the development of the economics discipline, they pondered (among many things) topics like population, the supply of labor, and worker wages. In so doing, they concluded--erroneously as it turns out--that continued population growth would push wages and living standards to a minimal subsistence level and keep them there. According to these early economists, the prospects for humanity were bleak, miserable, and well... downright dismal. Not Too DismalWhat they failed to adequately consider, however, were technology, capital investment, and limited population growth. Technological advances, by improving the quality of capital and increasing the skills of labor, made workers more productive, leading to increased wages and boosted living standards. Continued capital investment had a similar result. In addition, as living standards rose, people chose to have smaller families, which resulted in lower rates of population growth, which also led to increased wages.Dismal ScarcityAlthough the human condition is not nearly as bleak as anticipated by Malthus and Ricardo, economic dismality persists largely due to the persistent problem of scarcity. Combining unlimited wants and needs with limited resources means that everyone cannot have everything that they want. While politicians and others are fond of telling people what they can have, economists are generally in the position of telling people what they cannot have.The bottom line is that the human condition can improve and living standards can rise, but complete utopia is unlikely.
Recommended Citation:DISMAL SCIENCE, AmosWEB Encyclonomic WEB*pedia, http://www.AmosWEB.com, AmosWEB LLC, 2000-2018. [Accessed: August 16, 2018].
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BLUE PLACIDOLA
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Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time wandering around the downtown area trying to buy either galvanized steel storage shelves or a large green chalkboard shaped like the state of Maine. Be on the lookout for neighborhood pets, especially belligerent parrots.
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During the American Revolution, the price of corn rose 10,000 percent, the price of wheat 14,000 percent, the price of flour 15,000 percent, and the price of beef 33,000 percent.
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"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent. " -- Isaac Newton, mathematician, physicist
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