Problems

A converging empirical literature finds US corporate profits have risen far beyond competitive returns — markups, pure-profit shares, and firm-level return dispersion all point to growing economic rents, extending the Georgist rent analysis beyond land.

High urban land costs price the most productive workers and firms out of the best locations, misallocating labour and capital and lowering aggregate productivity. The direction is well-supported; the magnitude and the specifically-rent (vs regulation) version remain active research.

Which U.S. cities have high homelessness is explained by rent levels and rental vacancy rates, not by local rates of mental illness, drug use, or poverty — poorer cities often have less homelessness. GAO panel evidence: a $100 rent increase is associated with ~9% higher homelessness.

Where housing is expensive, decomposition shows it is the land under the house — not the cost of building it — that has appreciated: 80% of the post-1950 global house-price boom is land, and in constrained US metros land is the gap between price and build cost.

Estimates of total land rent suggest it could fund a substantial fraction — by some accounts most — of government, though figures are sensitive to assumptions.

Even where housing demand is most acute, homes sit empty for years and valuable land is used far below its potential — documented by quasi-experimental tax evidence from France, vacant-lot price data from US metros, and water-meter counts in Melbourne. Magnitude and cause remain contested.

The much-discussed rise in capital's share of income is, on decomposition, overwhelmingly a rise in the value of land under housing — vindicating a core Georgist claim.

Under optimal conditions, the land rent generated by public goods equals their cost — so capturing land rent can finance them with no other tax.

Transit lines, parks, and public services raise the value of nearby land — the empirical foundation for the Henry George Theorem and land value capture.

When capturing existing wealth pays better than creating new wealth, talent and effort flow into rent-seeking and growth suffers — the mainstream-economics core of the Georgist diagnosis, with strong theory and historical evidence but contested magnitudes.

Housing costs now determine who counts as poor in America — renters' supplemental poverty rate is 23.9% vs 5.7% for mortgaged owners — while rents have outrun renter incomes 21% to 2% since 2001, and the long-run rise in housing costs is driven by land prices, not construction.

Over the past century the expansion of banking in advanced economies has been, above all, the expansion of mortgage lending — and the value that lending is secured against is overwhelmingly land, not buildings. Much of what looks like 'financial deepening' is the banking system capitalising and coll

UK 30-year-olds are half as likely to own a home as their parents were; OECD house prices grew three times faster than median incomes; US millennial net worth ran ~40% below Gen X at the same age. The land under housing is where the generational wealth divide concentrates.