The Nation has thrown massive resources at the water pollution problems since 1972, only to witness the «relative failure of the regulatory and technical solutions it chose. (dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com)
Boucher introduces Lotto as «an outlier in Italian Renaissance art, a portrait painter capable of capturing the soul on canvas, a man whose religious art struck a note of sincerity in an age bound by ritual and dogma, a figure overshadowed in life by Titian and Raphael and condemned to poverty and relative failure in his own day.» (painters-table.com)
2) He assesses the most recent efforts at school reform — performance pay, school turnaround strategies, renewed emphasis on school accountability — as relative failures. (educationnext.org)