money & economicsThe Public Domain Review1879 · United States
Henry George's Progress and Poverty argued that landowners' unearned gains drive inequality
Henry George's 1879 book Progress and Poverty asked why economic progress seemed to increase poverty as well as wealth. His answer was that land values rise because of public investment and collective activity, but landowners capture that rise as rent while wages stagnate. He proposed a land value tax that would take this value for the community. The book sold several million copies and helped inspire the Progressive Era in the United States, and its influence reached Britain, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand. Critics, including Karl Marx, argued that it did not address ownership of the means of production.
Land near growing cities gains value as roads, schools and transit improve, but the owner keeps that gain by charging higher rent. A land value tax taxes the land's value rather than the buildings or income, so the public share of the gain returns to the community.
George's argument about rising land values set off a debate about who benefits from public investment, a debate that still shapes property tax policy. Mayors and economists have revisited his land value tax as cities grapple with housing costs.
Debates about who captures the gains of growth recur through history, from enclosure to modern housing markets. George's proposal reappears in later discussions of property taxes and public land value capture.
The board game Monopoly is often linked to the spread of George's ideas, since its early version was designed to show the effects of land monopoly.
background
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (P&P) is an 1879 book by social theorist and economist Henry George. It is a treatise on the questions of why poverty accompanies economic and technological progress and why economies exhibit a tendency toward cyclical boom and bust. George uses history and deductive logic to argue for a logical solution focusing on the capture of economic rent from natural resources and land titles.
Progress and Poverty, George's first book, sold several million copies, becoming one of the highest selling books of the late 1800s.
It helped spark the Progressive Era and a worldwide social reform movement around an ideology now known as Georgism. Jacob Riis, for example, explicitly marks the beginning of the Progressive Era awakening as 1879 because of the date of this publication. The Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman wrote this about the influence of Progress and Poverty:
From Wikipedia: Progress and Poverty (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗
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