George Smith: Vacationland’s love-hate relationship with tourists
By George Smith
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Longtime columnist George Smith, whose work filled this space every Wednesday for three decades, died Feb. 12. For the next several weeks, we will reprint some of George’s best columns. Here’s one from Feb. 1, 2012.
Mainers have always had a love-hate relationship with tourists. We’ve made them the centerpiece of our jokes, derided them as people “from away,” or worse, and even been subject to advertising urging us to be nicer to them.
The ads seemed to have worked. The key tourism survey in 2011 turned up no complaints about us but a few about our roads. We agree!
Claire Adida is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at UC San Diego, as well as a faculty affiliate with the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab (PDEL), the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS), and the Stanford Immigration and Integration Policy Lab. Her research is in comparative politics: more specifically in the study of identity, immigration and inter-group cooperation and conflict.
Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Economic Inquiry, Economics and Politics, the Journal of Population Economics, Cambridge University Press, and Harvard University Press.
The current state of knowledge emerging from a variety of public institutions is assessed through the application of a proxy indicator: the Infosys Prize. The prize, which seeks to reward “world-class research” by Indian scientists and scholars, is assessed by reviewing the different laureates through markers such as institutions of education, current research as well as social profile. The article, while recognising the limits of the data presented, raises some crucial questions at epistemic and structural biases that limit the scope of laureates to a set of elite institutions and knowledge systems.
When viewed in terms of knowledge and creativity, both classical and folk, India has an impressive record. India’s status as a knowledge powerhouse in the ancient world is perhaps unrivalled. A comprehensive account of these knowledge contributions requires a multivolume, multi-author effort, such as the Project of the History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture whose gener
Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman
The proposal of wealth taxation is coming back, in response to rising public debts and to the increase in inequality in Western countries, following the work by Piketty and Zucman (2014). Studies (Knoll et al. 2014, Bonnet et al. 2014) have made the three striking observations:
The housing component of national private wealth is explained by the spectacular rise of wealth relative to national income in several countries.
Housing wealth as the sum of two elements – structures and developed land – is mostly driven by the rise in housing prices.
Rising land values can explain most of the trends in the UK and in France.
‘Composing a good sher [verse] in the short metre merits a certificate of perfection (kamaal ki daleel) in the world of the ghazal’.
I was taken aback when I came across this pronouncement since I had never thought of metre in quite this way. Now I had an inspiration: why not apply the short metre test to weigh in on the ‘Great Comparison’ the longstanding debate as to who is the greater poet, Mir Taqi Mir or Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib?
As I was writing this, I came across a title from Harvard University Press; it was Nigel Smith’s Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? I felt this vindicated my plunge into the bottomless ocean of comparison.