Progress and Poverty

by Henry George, Bob Drake (Editor)

Why There Are Recessions and Poverty Amid Plenty—?and What to Do About It! Finally, one of the world's best-selling books on political economy has been edited and abridged for modern readers.Many economists and politicians foster the illusion that great fortunes and poverty stem from the presence or absence of individual skill and risk-taking. Henry George, by contrast, showed that the wealth gap occurs because a few people are allowed to monopolize natural opportunities and deny them to others. George did not advocate equality of income, the forcible redistribution of wealth, or government management of the economy. He simply believed that in a society not burdened by the demands of a privileged elite, a full and satisfying life would be attainable by Henry Bob Drake

344 pages, Paperback

Published June 14, 2006

About the author

Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, whose main tenet is that people should own what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly the value of land, belongs equally to all humanity. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), is a treatise on inequality, the cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of the land value tax as a remedy.

Reviews

[Zero Contradictions · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the modernized edition is an improvement over the original since it has better readability and removes a lot of the verbose language. Nevertheless, the language and arguments in the modernized edition are still rather outdated for today's modern world. Most modern resources for teaching and explaining Georgism are far superior for demonstrating the concepts that readers should understand.

The first 9 chapters of the book are highly fallacious and they aren't worth reading. They mostly consist of strawmen and bad arguments against Malthusianism, which I've refuted here.

Silvio Gesell also managed to refine and improve upon Georgist economic philosophy by identifying currency (and interest) as another major cause of economic inefficiency, in addition to land. Henry George identified the wrong cause and theory of interest, so the parts of the book that talk about interest (mainly chapters 12, 13, and 14) aren't worth reading since they're fallacious.

Chapter 39 is very erroneous and ignorant of applied evolutionary biology. Chapters 40 to 44 are out-dated and naive.

So, that leaves only chapters 10, 11, and 15 through 38 as the only chapters in the book that might be worth reading. But I didn't really need to read them, since I already knew and understood all the core arguments from better articulated resources that I had read. Even then, the economic theory present in them is still inferior to the theory articulated by Silvio Gesell and Gesellian authors. As is often the case, most political theory is outdated and overrated, compared to modern writings.

The book was very popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and I can see how it was ahead of its time during those periods. But overall, I don't think this book is worth reading, from a modern reader's standpoint.

[Henry Camp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this modern edition as a much more approachable version of George's brilliant ideas

[Roger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surely there must be lots lost in the abridging and modernizing of this text, because it at times feels completely lacking in examples while being dumbed down to a middle school reading level.

Henry George writes more like a pastor, but this book is written more like an economist. Unfortunately, the economics foundation laid early in the book seems confused at best and consistently self-contradictory at worst. (Again, this may be a translation problem with this edition.)

The middle portion of the book are the takeaways from this foundation, which are much more cohesive and sensible - but there’s still a bad taste from the patchwork philosophy of the first ~50 pages.

The last bit of the book is where George presumably gets preachy (toned down in this modernized edition) about the whole world history and everlasting truths about human nature and society.

George is a better preacher than logician, but his preaching is still based is some semblance of sound economic thought, which thought is just poorly expressed in the beginning foundation of this edition from the Henry George Foundation.