A Substack on Georgism and land value tax, covering housing, land policy, and property assessment.
Commenters recommend it for housing and land policy, linking posts on land banking, land value tax, and Norway's Georgist policies.
> landlords will exit the market until equilibrium is restored
Thus a increasing the supply of properties being sold, and thus lowering the price for those who want to buy, allowing more to buy, reducing the demand for places to rent. Win-Win.
With LVT (or higher interest rate on a variable rate mortgage) the parasitical landlord can't simply stop having a tenant, as they're still liable for the costs. They have to offer something more than the intrinsic cost of land they occupy to make it productive enough for someone to pay them.
> LVT also only applies to commodities, of which software isn’t really.
There's a strong argument that copyright (specifically that used to prevent people from using it) would count as "Land" in the economic sense - it drives rentseeking and monopoly behavior - https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/possibility-space-location-rents
An interesting debate, but somewhat offtopipc
A full land value tax has never been tried.
Currently the closest example is Singapore[0], but they have much more central control than what a Georgist would find ideal. 99 year leases are far to long, and shorter leases would have much more beneficial effects.
Detroit was an example of a city that massively expanded[1] because of it, but eventually lost it's way.
Harrison, PA[2] is an example of a city that 'recently' used a revenue neutral split-rate system to keep from going bankrupt.
[0]: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/singapore-economic-prosperity-through
[1]: https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2013/0813clevelandgaffney.html
[2]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-gains-the-pennsylvania-land-tax-experiment
I think video games are massively under-studied, particularly in the realm of behavioral Economics.
One of my favorite seminal pieces is Zachary Booth Simpson's paper 1999 paper on the Economics of Ultima Online:
https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-In-game-Economics-of-Ultima-Online.pdf
In my own field, I keep finding more and more instances of MMO's and online virtual worlds that reproduce the real-world housing crisis.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-value-tax-in-online-games-and
Norway had successfully georgist tax policies in place for hydropower for half a century at that point. He was not fighting as much of an uphill battle as he would almost anywhere else:
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and-future-georgist-kingdom/
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sovereign-wealth-fund?ts=w
(Update: This is not to detract from his achievement, but to harp on the fact that Georgism is one of the most useful, underrated tools in the economic toolboxt)
> housing has been turned into a zero sum game
Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for.
And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum).
Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike
Yeah this is the landbanking problem. The solution is something like a land value tax which penalizes this kind of speculation and development-throttling. In fact there was a great article about that I just posted: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-and-the-liberty-to-build-on