Monthly Archives: September 2021

A permanent display housing replicas of Americas founding documents will be located on the grounds of the new courthouse facility in Carthage. The Moore County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved the proposed site Tuesday.

Chairman Frank Quis said the selected site is very appropriate, noting similar settings where replicas of the Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution and Bill of Rights are displayed have primarily been located at or near courthouses around the state. The site will also benefit the town by providing additional visitor and resident foot traffic to the area, Quis added.

The initial concept was presented to county leaders in April. As the sponsoring organization, Foundation Forward aims to install what it terms Charters of Freedom settings in all 100 North Carolina counties and, eventually, all 3,142 jurisdictions across the country.

Commissioner Catherine Graham reiterated during discussion there will be no public funding. The setting will be installed on county-owned land but the actual material and construction costs will be raised entirely through private donations.

County Manager Wayne Vest said a letter of intent with Foundation Forward has not yet been formally reviewed or approved by county leaders. Speaking to The Pilot following the meeting, he anticipated that would likely be a next step in the process.

Earlier this summer, Quis said he hoped the project would receive bipartisan interest and support; however, local Democratic leaders have expressed concern whether there has been adequate due diligence of the project.

In an open letter published by The Pilot in June, Maurice Holland, Jr., chair of the Moore County Democratic Party, said the proposed Charters of Freedom setting lacks a full recounting of the story of the creation of the United States by omitting the Colonial period and pathetically attempting to whitewash the heinous stain of slavery.

The Constitution does not specifically mention race but the original document did not recognize the rights of Native Americans and it counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of voting apportionment. Slavery was not abolished until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865.

I value bipartisanship and would welcome the opportunity to work with the Moore County Republican Party to improve Moore County, but so far, I and my fellow Democrats have not been given a seaworthy vessel with which to sail the stormy waters, Holland wrote.

Lowell Simon also submitted an open letter to The Pilot questioning Foundation Forwards financial backing and its apparent ties to conservative causes. He also expressed concern whether local leadership had access to or had reviewed the free educational materials the organization has offered to provide to area schools as part of the overall project.

In addition to replicas of the nations founding documents, typically each semi-circular Charters of Freedom setting also includes permanent pavers recognizing individuals and sponsors. In addition, a donors plaque is placed prominently at the setting and a time capsule is also sealed at each project site to be opened on Constitution Day, Sept. 17, 2087, which is the 300th anniversary of the Constitution.

In other action on Tuesday, the Moore County Board of Commissioners:

Proclaimed September as National Recovery Month and recognized the contributions of Drug Free Moore County. The organization works to prevent and combat substance abuse by increasing awareness, providing information and encouraging support for various recovery initiatives and programs.

Heard a presentation on The Tides, a Wilmington-based nonprofit agency that serves pregnant and postpartum women with opioid use disorder

Received a quarterly fiscal report for Sandhills Center for Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities/Substance Abuse Services

Appointed Roland Gilliam and Tom McPherson to the Airport Authority

Appointed Silva Porter Deal and Edmund Kielty to the Nursing and Adult Care Home Community Advisory Committee

Reappointed Matthew Rothbeind to the Sandhills Center Board of Directors

Reappointed Frank Thigpen and Kathy Liles to the Board of Adjustment

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County Commissioners Approve Location for Charters of Freedom - Southern Pines Pilot

Without question, this road back will demand a renewal of New York State governments focus on and commitment to economic growth, job creation and fiscal responsibility in short, to opening the doors to a brighter and stronger future for workers.

Labor Day has always been a meaningful and steadfast day of tribute across this region, a region that has been built on and where we have long honored a deep-rooted respect for so many of the foundations of this nation: agriculture and craftsmanship, manufacturing and small business, tourism and hospitality, outdoors and recreation, education and health care, and on through the anchors of the modern high-tech economy in research and development, and technology.

It is a remarkable local history of working men and women, and a great source of pride for all of us.

We do well every year to recall and pay tribute to all of the workers across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes who day after day, year after year, generation after generation, build, care for, educate, grow, manufacture, protect and serve and strengthen our communities in so many different ways through so many different walks of life.

We are grateful for your dedication, your perseverance and your excellence.

In 1887, New York was one of the first four states to establish a Labor Day holiday.

In its overview, the U.S. Department of Labor frames the historical significance of Labor Day this way, The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nations strength, freedom, and leadership the American worker.

This tribute is especially true this year, at a time which has taken and continues to take an enormous toll on workers in so many fields but where American workers, here at home and across this land, have kept us going.

For me, as a legislator, it means that government faces a particular challenge and responsibility moving forward to help our workers and our local economies rebuild and recover. I know that I share this sense of responsibility with so many of the men and women I workwith in government, at every level, to pursue the goals wesharefor the future of the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes.

This work of recovery and rebuilding is underway at the moment in many places and numerous ways. I look forward to seeing it through. It will be a challenging road back, to say the least. Together, however, I fully believe we can and we will find solid ground again.

Without question, this road back will demand a renewal of New York State governments focus on and commitment to economic growth, job creation and fiscal responsibility in short, to opening the doors to a brighter and stronger future for workers.

This commitment and focus has lost its way in recent years in New York -- and remains at risk -- however the pledge continueson this Labor Day to keepworking to ensure that it finds its place again in this government in the months and years ahead.

My best wishes to all of you.

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On this Labor Day, a commitment to recovery and rebuilding - The New York State Senate

Rather than a spoonful of sugar, this canny performance-art duo are serving up free booze and well-honed comedy to help their political theatre go down a treat. Beginning as a likeably chaotic dispatch from Malta, complete with multimedia and vulgar vocabulary lessons, their latest work stealthily shifts into darker territory: corruption, migrants and murder.

In 2018, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, aka Sh!t Theatre, were invited to create a show to mark Vallettas year as European City of Culture by their friend Charlie (who looks like a dictators wife, who has just poisoned him). Semi-joking that they were attracted by the cash and a free holiday, they originally planned to theme the piece around their last year of being Europeans, ahead of Brexit.

Their Maltese base of operations, re-created on stage, is The Pub, a dingy expat watering hole where Oliver Reed died in 1999 while filming Gladiator. The venue sells stomach-churning merchandise inspired by this morbid brush with fame, including T-shirts emblazoned with Reeds final order: eight pints of lager, 12 double rums, 14 whiskeys. Those shirts are part of the performers costumes, along with naval jackets with epaulettes, the Brits-abroad classic socks with sandals, and faces painted with a mix of the St Georges and Maltese crosses.

The show, which began at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, originally had plenty of audience interaction necessarily rejigged here because of Covid, and with mixed results; theres the odd longueur. Otherwise, this is a slick operation that merely feints at anarchy, thanks in part to director/dramaturg Adam Brace. There is remarkable fluency between the two performers, who either trade off lighting-fast lines (punctuated by shots of rum) or speak in unison, supported by well-timed and creative use of video and audio clips, photographs, illustrations, news reports and repurposed sea shanties.

Their, and our, initial tourist introduction to Malta is wryly comic as we encounter absurdities like the roundabouts that no local driver understands, or, courtesy of a deeply religious society, Virgin Mary statues guarding the eggs in supermarkets. But the chatter about why Brits love living here sea, sun and fiscal freedom becomes more loaded as they discuss the semantic difference between expat and immigrant. Why does the government criminalise those desperate refugees making an often-fatal journey across the Mediterranean, but allow anyone to buy citizenship for 650,000? The journalist asking those uncomfortable questions, Daphne Caruana Galizia, is brutally silenced.

The brilliance of this production is its absurdist juxtaposition, flipping between cat videos and car bombs, cheese platters and torture, while seeded motifs, like dogs and passports, gain new significance. It interrogates how we consume news, which stories were allowed to tell, and our inescapable interconnectedness: this is as much about our own island, too.

Yet even as the show becomes increasingly topical (including up-to-the-minute script additions) and blazingly confrontational, its still playful, personal and thoroughly entertaining theatre that never feels like a lecture. Both horror and humour linger long afterwards.

Until Sept 11. Tickets: 020 7478 0100; sohotheatre.com

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Sh!t Theatre, Drink Rum with Expats, review: sharp comedy that flips between cat videos and car bombs - Telegraph.co.uk

Published by Madisson Heinl on Sep 7, 2021

By Sarah Steimer

George S. Tolley, the noted economist who led groundbreaking research on resource use, farm labor migration, urban economics, and environmental economics, died Aug. 31 at the age of 95.

The professor emeritus in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics was a pioneer in environmental, urban, and energy economics, working in higher education, civil service, and private consultancy. His research covered a broad range of topics, including migration and agricultural policy, water allocation, water investments in depressed areas, international trade in agriculture and economic development, social costs and rural-urban balance, resource allocation effects of environmental policies, fiscal externalities and suburbanization, road capacity and city size, tax rates and national incomes, and freeing up transit markets.

Tolley was part of a group of very distinguished economists at Chicago, says James J. Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics. They created an atmosphere that has been accurately described as really thinking the purpose of the economics department was a serious one and there to solve the problems of the world and to do it in a way that was lasting and empirically grounded in understanding a wide range of public policy questions. George was in that group and was a very active player a student of that environment who kept it alive and helped it flourish.

Born in Washington, D.C., Tolleys early life particularly living through the Great Depression shaped his interest in economics. I was going to devote my life to make sure it didn't happen again, Tolley said in a 2018 interview. If I want to do something useful, that's what I should do.

But he also had an inside look at the world of economics through his father, Howard R. Tolley, who served as chief of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (subsequently consolidated with other USDA units) during the New Deal and World War II. The younger Tolley recalls summers spent at a desk in his fathers outer office.

Tolley attended American University for undergraduate studies before heading to UChicago for graduate school, earning his PhD in economics in 1955. He said he rejected the idea of going to an Ivy League school, instead preferring the idea of rough and tumble Chicago where he found more intellectual freedom without the confines of being proper.

It was here he encountered some of the best-known minds in economics and mathematics: Theodore Schultz, Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, Harry Markowitz, Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, D. Gale Johnson, and Oskar Lange, to name a few. (He was also good friends with fellow student Mike Nichols, who went on to direct classic movies including The Graduate.) Tolley was part of Schultzs agriculture group at UChicago, studying problems of agricultural modernization in the U.S. and worldwide. The primary paper from his dissertation was published in the Journal of Farm Economics and received the cash prize for excellence from the American Farm Economics Association.

After receiving his PhD, Tolley spent 11 years as a faculty member at North Carolina State University as associate professor of agricultural economics before returning to UChicago as a professor in 1966. He shifted his focus from agriculture to urban economics, establishing urban economics as an area in the UChicago graduate program by the early 1970s a rare offering in economics departments at the time. But his approach remained in the Chicago tradition in that it drew on price theory to analyze urban problems. Tolley served as director of the Center for Urban Studies at UChicago from 1978 to 1985. More recent work in the field of urban economics is often based on Tolleys city bigness framework.

Tolley was particularly compelling for his ability to move across economic fields and subjects, which also gave his work deep policy relevance. He was an internationally recognized leader in the development and application of techniques for measuring costs and values that are determined outside of conventional markets. He used such techniques to bring a modern lens to the field in addressing urban and environmental economics. For one example, Tolley developed a practical benefit-cost framework for dealing with pollution in the Chicago area with funding from the National Science Foundation.

George Tolley hired me as his research assistant when he was a young assistant professor in the economics department. He was a very patient teacher of his young helper, says Lester G. Telser, professor emeritus in Economics. At the end of the summer I had to decide whether I would return to Harvard. I made an appointment with Theodore W. Schultz, head of the economics department. Given my experience with George, T. W. did not have a hard sell. I switched to the University of Chicago.

Beginning in the 1960s, Tolley consulted for federal, state, and municipal agencies on urban and environmental problems. His research and expertise helped with the design of such policies as the Clean Air Act, and his techniques have helped determine the valuation of urban and environmental amenities and improvements in health and medical treatments. This included his seminal work on health economics, Valuing Health for Policy: An Economic Approach, which moved the field to a broader view of the economics of wellness.

His work on public policy questions was very influential when it was written and remains so now, says Robert E. Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Economics.

Tolleys work outside of academia included his time as director of the Economic Development Division of the Economic Research Service of the USDA from 1964 to 1965 the direct descendant of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics that his father once led. In 1974 and 1975, he served as deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Tax Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Tolley also served on the President's Task Force on Urban Renewal, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Automotive Pollution, and the Energy Engineering Board at the National Research Council.

Tolley was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003 and founded the journal Resource and Energy Economics, which published a special issue in his honor in 2001. He held visiting professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, Purdue University, Nankai University, and Guelph University. He was the recipient of the Honor A Colleague award by the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis in 2018. His published works include 22 books and more than 50 articles. He also served as CEO of RCF Consulting his own firm where he directed mail volume forecasting work for the U.S. Postal Service and helped the USPS develop approaches to postal volume forecasts.

Many in the UChicago community also recall Tolley as a mentor. He directed 69 PhD dissertations as committee chair, one each year in his 12 years at North Carolina State and 57 at UChicago. In the 2001 special issue of Resource and Energy Economics, University of Kentucky economist Glenn C. Blomquist made note of Tolleys ability to educate students, colleagues, and policymakers:

George S. Tolleys gentle but probing questions have influenced his colleagues and generations of graduate students to think more clearly about how to use their economic tool kit to answer policy questions. He has been equally able to influence the broader group of social scientists and public administrators who develop and implement public policy. As a member of multidisciplinary academic committees and while working with and in government, he has been able to focus attention on basic economic questions. How will individuals react to this policy? How will achieving this policy goal affect the attainment of other policy goals? While many economists can tell noneconomists these things, Georges great talent is in getting them to believe that they had discovered these issues on their own.

Tolley gave his time generously to others, whether exchanging ideas, offering advice, or establishing collaborations. Numerous economists received his guidance, many of whom also rose to prominence in public service, financial institutions, and universities across the globe.

His students were fiercely loyal to him, Heckman says. He was very active on PhD theses and working with students. Hes got a big legacy of producing people and producing ideas and his students are continuing that.

Economist Vinod Thomas, AM74, PhD77 and currently a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore, studied under Tolley and eventually collaborated with him on research for the World Bank. He says Tolley had a highly respected global presence and was a low-key but forceful leader in applying empirical economics to vexing country problems. But locally on the UChicago campus, Thomas remembers Tolley giving liberally of his time, including his personal time.

I recall putting the finishing touches to my PhD thesis while going with him to pick up some items at the supermarket for a late meal that Alice Tolley with their daughter Catherine in our midst would graciously host at their home in Hyde Park.

George is survived by his wife Alice, his daughter Catherine, son-in-law Bill, and two grandsons. The Tolley Family requests that gifts in memory of Prof. Tolley be directed to the George S. Tolley Prize. The prize was initiated by Thomas to recognize and reward a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Economics whose research paper demonstrates the potential for the impact of economic analysis on policy. A memorial gift may be made online. Please email Yasmin Omer for more information. Plans for a memorial service will be forthcoming.

Pictured above:

Photo 1: Prof. Tolley at his desk with a picture of the US Treasury, where he worked, behind him.

Photo 2:Prof. Tolley early in his career at UChicago

This story was originally published as a news article by the Division of the Social Sciences at UChicago. The original article can be found at socialsciences.uchicago.edu.

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George S. Tolley, pioneer in environmental, urban, and energy economics, 1925-2021 | Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics | The University of...