What is "unproductive"

Usage examples of "unproductive".

But owing to the stupid money system, which these laborers them selves help to keep in force, the results of their combined efforts were either usurped by an unproductive class fortunate enough to be born rich, or those shrewd enough to accumulate money, such as trust managers, bankers, real estate speculators, stock jobbers, and brokers, gamblers, burglars, money loan swindlers, high salaried clergymen, etc.

This, everyone knew, was the commander of the Omistolian fleet and the one who had carried out the short and unproductive dialogue with Captain Pressman earlier.

Saks, where she spent a lovely hour wandering around haute couture, trying on unaffordable Carolina Herrera dresses and listening to interesting but unproductive conversations.

It was just the kind of unproductive, noncommercial afternoon that was beginning to make dope-smokers so unpopular with corporate America.

I was enormously proud of my grandfather, and not only because he was in charge of trains and could click messages down a wire all the way to New York City, if he wanted to, but also because he was a half-blood Onondagan whose parents had immigrated to the United States from their unproductive farm on a tributary of the St.

In that period it seemed as ifonly the labor of waged workers was productive, and therefore all the other segments of labor appeared as merely reproductive or even unproductive.

With the exception of a few tribes which had been driven during the great migrations into unproductive deserts or highlands, and were thus compelled periodically to prey upon their better-favoured neighbours--apart from these, the great bulk of the Teutons, the Saxons, the Celts, the Slavonians, and so on, very soon after they had settled in their newly-conquered abodes, reverted to the spade or to their herds.

Linnaeus has calculated that if an annual plant produced only two seeds--and there is no plant so unproductive as this--and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants.

Thus the endeavors of most of the bafflers upon both sides, while earnest enough and deadly enough of intent, were almost comically unproductive of result.

At the end of an unproductive three hours of also-rans, the trainer told his jockey that good owners were harder to replace than good riders (Red Millbrook excepted).

Deprive people of the fruits of their labor, and yet more, force them to produce by fear, confiscate their time, their painstaking efforts and their persons, reduce them to the condition of fellahs, create in them the sentiments of fellahs, and you will have nothing but the labor and productions of fellahs, that is to say, a minimum of labor and production, and hence, insufficient supplies for sustaining a very dense population, which, multiplied through a superior and more productive civilization, will not long subsist under a barbarous, inferior and unproductive régime.

One of these hills is the ancient Mount of Blessings and the other the Mount of Curses and wise men who seek for fulfillments of prophecy think they find here a wonder of this kind--to wit, that the Mount of Blessings is strangely fertile and its mate as strangely unproductive.

Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction of hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gatherers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.

Corde took notes, jotting down the boxy oriental letters, but the hours were unproductive.

Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had invented him—.