Georgism

Unfollowed it like that

... as a Georgist is that every gain we have in buying, in, in manufacturing, for example, enormous flat-screen TVs that cost almost nothing, almost every gain we've brought to consumers in the shape of EasyJet or Ryanair, every gain we've brought to consumers in the fact that actually don't buy...

If you buy a secondhand car, don't buy a secondhand car for 300 or 400 quid.

You'll get a piece of shit, right? Okay?

Hi.

This is Lars Doucet, author of the book review of Henry George's Progress and Poverty that won the first ACX book review contest, as well as the three-part follow-up guest post series, Does Georgism Work? A lot has happened since then, including land value tax enablement laws passing this year in two US states and the election of LVT friendly national leaders in the UK and South Korea.

As for me, I now work full time for the Center for Land Economics and write for Progress and Poverty Substack.

I'd like to reflect on what I wrote five years ago, what I was right about, what I've changed my mind on, and what the outlook for LVT is in twenty twenty-six.

Additionally, in January twenty twenty-five, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT that survived a subsequent court challenge.

Although we're tempering our expectations, the effective tax rate of the German LVT is quite low, and it remains to be seen how ambitious the Burnham and Lee administrations will be, it's clear that LVT is no longer an obscure idea nationally or internationally.

Finally, many now believe that the economic effects of AI developments may accelerate support for LVT and Georgism more generally.

As newly minted AI millionaires bid up land prices in San Francisco and Seoul, Adam Ozimek argues that land will be a winner in the age of AI.

The overall tone was critical of Apple's approach, with a sense that the project was overly ambitious and not suitable for mass market success.

Title, Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later.

Source, Astral Codex 10.

The article reflects on the progress of Georgism and land value tax over five years, highlighting recent legislative wins in states like Virginia and Kentucky and international interest from the UK, South Korea, and Germany.

Lars Doucet discusses the practical advancements in assessing land values, counterarguments about land scarcity, and the political dynamics involved.

He also shares personal experiences, the importance of grassroots work, and the ongoing challenges of implementing LVT on a broader scale.

So to get things started tonight, I'm also going to keep the intro relatively short as it regards myself.

I think that little overview will suffice, and I just want to kind of get into the game aspect, the Georgist aspect, which is, I think, what everyone is most interested in here.

So I'm going to lead up to the game I created.

I'm going to go back in time first and give you all a little bit of history that led up to this point and what it means for me to recreate this game now.

In the two 1800s board games I have here, you have the pleasures of astronomy and the circle of knowledge.

And you can see hopefully that they both involve uh different shapes of a game track with squares either in a spiral shape a square or You would see different varieties, but the great majority of games from this era involved moving around a game track Which represented different ideas and often connected to an experience of learning from gameplay? So That is the environment that Lizzie McGee was born into.

If you've never heard of her before, she is the inventor of the original Georgist board game called the Landlord's Game.

So I want to frame this discussion through the evolution of that earlier game and how it became the very well-known game Monopoly, and now how I've recreated Prosperity as a version of the Landlord's Game, which sort of honors the Georgist tradition that was buried somewhere along the way in this history.

Sure.

I mean, the Georgist movement peaks right in the in the progressive era, right, as the automobile starts to massively disperse the value of land.

It just can't.

So the economic base is kind of disappears for Georgia's vision.