Progress and poverty

What Hacker News says

1. Der_EinzigeAug 2026
   Crazy how historically wrong Das Kapital is as a book. The labor theory of value has done enormous amounts of damage to humans world-wide with its lies. Watching Marx turn himself into pretzels to explain how to calculate the "Socially necessary labor time" is entertaining if it didn't have the baggage of motivating dozens of horrible, no good revolutions, useless, damaging revolutions.

   If you want a good starting point book for an alternative to traditional capitalism and with a focus on the commons with none of this baggage, I highly recommend Henry George (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George) and "Progress and Poverty" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty) as it is a head-and-shoulders better read.

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2. ecshaferJun 2026
   Rent extraction is bad, since it hurts productivity. Ill admit I am an unabashed Georgist, but the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George is pretty accessible. But basically this: Capital and Capitalists are good, they have money, then lend it for ownership, this creates innovation. Labor is good, you need workers, they work, they produce, its good. But Rent (extracting value from land, patents, etc.) is just a negative drain, labor has to pay rent, capital has to pay rent, but they don't really innovate and grow the economy.
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3. ecshaferMay 2026
   The book Progress and Poverty argues this. Basically as we see wealth increase, increases in population and productivity raise the value of land (economic rent). Landowners capture this value, while wages for labor stagnate. A Land Value Tax and other taxes on rents removes that extraction, so people are able to reap its benefits. Meanwhile it also stop taxing productive things, like capital and labor, incentivizing people to work harder and invest. Runaway wealth is often parked in land other rents, but as land is taxed it, in incentivized investment: more housing, more innovation, etc to be more utilized more efficienty.
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4. skew-aberrationMay 2026
   You'll likely enjoy the book 'Progress and Poverty' by Henry George. His 'land theory of everything' predicted continued increasing rents, decreasing interest rates, low real wages, continued global population growth, the GFC, analysed the case of superintelligent AI, explained how free trade and immigration without tax reform would lead to backlash from working class, and that communist states would become tyrannical dictatorships - all in 1879.
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5. yonranAug 2025
   > why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?

   May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.

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6. kliptMar 2025
   Henry George wrote about this a hundred years ago in Progress and Poverty! His solution: a tax on land (not buildings) to encourage building up. Economists say it's one of the most efficient taxes possible.
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