Originally published on Henry George Foundation on August 10, 2026. Republished on Progress.org with permission.
HGF’s Open Day Event will take place in London on Saturday the 12th September. In preparation for this year’s event, I am delighted to introduce a guest post from Martin Whitlock, who is one of the four speakers booked for the event. Martin’s presentation will demonstrate the communicative power of striking visual imagery, which he will use to explore fundamental economic questions concerning the nature of wealth, the relationship between wealth and money, and the meaning of real economic growth. In this guest post, Martin explains the motivation and thinking behind his new art and economics project “Bonkers Economics” and invites readers to suggest ideas for economic data that could inspire new images. Feel free to respond to Martin’s invitation by leaving a comment or writing an email to Martin at the email address on his Bonkers Economics website.
What is wealth? It’s a question I’ve thought about for decades, and I’ve finally arrived at a definition that makes sense to me: Wealth is that which sustains and improves the quality of people’s lives. In that definition, a good night’s sleep is a key component of people’s wealth.
This definition is the starting point for Bonkers Economics, an art and economics project inspired by decades of failure of economic policy, in the UK and elsewhere. The word “bonkers” is there because the definition of wealth really is very simple, and yet policy-makers seem to go out of their way to make achieving it extremely hard.
In the current political climate, with a new prime minister in the offing (or already arrived, depending on when you are reading this…) and with traditional political allegiances fracturing, it feels as if change is finally in the air. The last time this happened was in the 1980s, with the arrival of what we now know as neoliberalism. There really was a sea-change in values, and to many people it made sense at the time. Now we know where it has taken us, that question of values has returned to the forefront of political and economic thinking once again.
By way of example: questions of growth are being overtaken by questions of distribution. Trickle-down clearly didn’t work, so what might? And we’re not short of good ideas, whether from Henry George, or the Modern Monetarists, or proponents of UBI, to name just three.
In fact, the number of think tanks, campaigning groups and academics working on what we might broadly call “new economy” ideas is huge, and growing. And yet the traction they’ve managed to achieve at government and policy-making level is far less than they deserve.
I wrote an article about this once, referencing a fascinating RSA research paper. The paper noted that well thought-out policy ideas, ideas that could make a real difference, generally present as examples of “design thinking.” The “system” rejects this sort of thinking through a mechanism that the paper calls a “system immune response”. The effectiveness of great design, the paper argues, is blunted by a lack of “systems thinking”, which means understanding what has to happen for the system to accept a proposed innovation.
So what does have to happen? Fundamentally, people need to think differently about the economy - what it is and what it can do. Margaret Thatcher’s notorious “household analogy” for the government’s finances is only one, powerful, example of deeply embedded ideas that have to be shifted.
And it’s not just in the public mind that this shift is needed. Most politicians, journalists and opinion-formers still broadly hold to this analogy as true. And the reason they hold to it is because it is intuitively reasonable and easy to explain. It gives the reassurance of a comfort blanket and does not invite a critical response.
Another example is house prices. A majority in the UK - and certainly a majority of likely voters - own their homes (or borrow them from their mortgage lenders). So policy- and opinion-makers hold tightly to the idea that rising house prices are a good thing, because they make people richer. In reality, of course, rising house prices have brought about a massive transfer of money-wealth from home owners to lenders and landowners. And rising house prices are definitely not a good thing for people moving up the housing ladder, who have to borrow disproportionately more at each rung.
I’ve been thinking and writing about these sorts of questions for a long time. But with my new project I’m trying something different. As a way of challenging that system immune response I’m adopting an approach of “show, don’t tell.” My object is to invite curiosity and critical thinking, and my method is to create images based on economic data that function initially simply as images - pictures to look at, where the starting point is the work itself and how the viewer responds to the visual encounter.
These are not graphs or infographics from which the viewer is expected to interpret or make sense of a set of numbers. To start with, at least, it is not a question of understanding. Each work tries to convey a mood - through colour, shape and arrangement - that reflects the data that inspired it. That mood creates a gateway: an invitation but not a requirement to explore the possibility of meaning and to draw out the data on which each work is based. You can find a gallery of images on the Bonkers Economics website - bonkerseconomics.net.
I’ll be bringing my images, and the economic ideas and data that have inspired them, to a talk at the Henry George Foundation Open Day in London in September. In anticipation of that talk, I’d like to invite participants to suggest ideas for data that could inspire new images.
It works best when the data is quite simple and supports a point that is unexpected or shocking. Here is a simple example, which shows the money the government received when it sold the English water industry debt-free in 1989 (in blue), and the amount the subsequent owners paid out to themselves in dividends between 1989 and 2019 (in green).
I don’t doubt that there is plenty of data around the Land Question that would make striking images and inspire curiosity about the work of Henry George. Do let me know your ideas, either in the comments here or in some other way (there is an email address on the Bonkers Economics website). I look forward to hearing them, and having the opportunity to share my response to some of them, at least, at the Open Day in September.
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