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View allProgress and Poverty
George
1879
The 19th century's best-selling economics book, built around one paradox: why does poverty deepen as wealth grows?
Progress and Poverty
Henry George · 1879
George's 1879 treatise set out to explain a paradox that still unsettles people: why does material progress seem to produce, rather than relieve, poverty? His answer — that rising land rent captures the gains of progress before labor and capital can share them — led him to propose a single tax on land value in place of all other taxation. The book was a sensation, selling millions of copies and launching a Single Tax movement that shaped early progressive politics on several continents. Land-value taxation is still debated by economists and policymakers today, which makes this the rare 19th-century economics bestseller whose central proposal remains a live argument.
46 chapters · 167,638 words · ~12.7 hr read
Contents
Preface & Introductory
George's own preface, and the statement of the paradox the whole book exists to solve — why does poverty deepen as wealth and productive power increase?
Book I — Wages and Capital
George clears away the current doctrine that wages are drawn from a fixed pool of capital, arguing instead that wages are produced by labor itself.
Book II — Population and Subsistence
A sustained refutation of the Malthusian theory that population growth necessarily outstrips subsistence and so explains away poverty as a natural law.
Book III — The Laws of Distribution
George's core theoretical machinery: the laws of rent, interest, and wages, and how they correlate to explain the distribution of wealth.
Book IV — Effect of Material Progress
How population growth, technological improvement, and the expectations raised by progress itself act on the distribution of wealth.
Book V — The Problem Solved
George states his solution: rising land rent, driven by the mechanism laid out in Book III, is what causes poverty to persist and deepen amid advancing wealth.
Book VI — The Remedy
George weighs and rejects the remedies currently advocated before proposing his own — the single tax on land value.
Book VII — Justice of the Remedy
The moral case: why private property in land is unjust, traced through history and through its consequences for laborers.
Book VIII — Application of the Remedy
How the single tax would actually work, tested against the accepted canons of sound taxation, with George's answers to anticipated objections.
Book IX — Effects of the Remedy
What George predicts the single tax would do to the production and distribution of wealth, to individuals and classes, and to social life itself.
Book X & Conclusion — The Law of Human Progress
George widens the lens to civilization itself, asking what drives progress and what causes it to decline, before closing on the problem of individual life.