Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, The Remedy

Henry George (1839-97) was an American journalist and newspaper editor. In Progress and Poverty, his most famous work (1879), he seeks to explain the apparent paradox that the gulf between rich and poor in a developed city (or nation) is much less that that in a less developed community: 'Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.' His economic ideas were widely debated, and this volume also contains a response to the 1881 English edition of the book from Isaac B. Cooke, a cotton broker from Liverpool, and Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), a short but telling description of the reality of the poverty then to be found in the world's richest city.… (more)

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LibraryThing member questbird

Interesting ideas. Sometimes pompous-sounding exposition. Summary: Rent = income from the use of land; comes at the expense of wages but is not itself productive. Community concentration of labour makes rents increase, which reduces wages ultimately to rock-bottom slavery levels. Therefore tax rent

to a large degree to give money back to the community; reduce all other taxes and watch productivity and wages soar, poverty and land speculation end, good government return, civilisation wax instead of wane.

George's ideas have relevance today and have never been fully implemented. Income taxes are only a century old but we regard them as the bedrock of taxation. What if there were another way? Henry George believed that private monopoly ownership of land is an evil which causes poverty and inequality, and ultimately the downfall of civilisation.

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LibraryThing member albertgoldfain

Highly ambitious and inventive for its time and, perhaps, even for our time. Merits consideration by anyone who cares about income inequality and land monopoly. I don't quite buy that a land value tax will cure as many ills as George does, but there is no questioning the ethical foundation.

LibraryThing member TJ_Petrowski

An incredibly well-written book. Although I disagree with the author's conclusions, and Marx himself found them laughable, Henry George is a fantastic writer and his arguments against Malthus are an important read.

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