Narrative Framework — Design Index for the Narratives Section

Purpose

This page is the framework index for the narratives/ section — the blueprint from which the individual narrative pages are drafted. A narrative here is a persuasive story used by advocates of Georgism and the land value tax. Narrative pages report these stories in NPOV voice ("advocates argue…"), map the evidence for and against them honestly, and end with practical deployment guidance. They are the wiki's bridge between the evidence base (outcomes/, research/) and real-world persuasion.

Exemplar: Narrative: The Unearned Increment is the completed model page. Match its structure, sourcing density, and tone.

Drafting rules (binding for T2)

1. Template (EDITORIAL.md §6): Core Claim · Who Promotes It · Research That Supports It · Research That Challenges It — or Is Missing · Counter-Arguments and Georgist Responses · Historical Examples · How to Deploy It · See Also · annotated Sources.
2. Frontmatter: title, category: narratives, tags, stub: false, excerpt, narrative_type (moral|economic|practical|environmental|historical), supported_by (existing outcome slugs), related_people, related_places (must resolve), last_reviewed.
3. Slug convention: where a narrative shares a name with an existing concept page, the narrative slug takes a -narrative suffix (slugs are global in Ghost — a duplicate is a lint error). Otherwise use the descriptive phrase below.
4. Honesty is the persuasion strategy. The "challenges / missing" section is mandatory and must be substantive. Never assert the narrative's claim in wiki voice; attribute it. Match language to evidence strength (EDITORIAL.md §4).
5. Linking: every narrative page links its evidence pages, its objection pages, at least two sibling narratives, and this index's exemplar where relevant, so no narrative page is an orphan. Never link a slug that does not exist yet — write planned slugs as inline code (as this page does).

The Twelve Narratives

Type balance: moral ×3, economic ×3, practical ×3, environmental ×1, historical ×2.

1. The Single Tax — single-tax-narrative (practical) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Government could be funded by a single levy on land values, replacing taxation of work, enterprise, and exchange — radical simplification with no penalty on production. The historical brand of the movement (see the Single Tax concept page, which covers the doctrine; the narrative page covers its persuasive use).
• Who promotes it: Henry George (Progress and Poverty, Book VIII), Tom L. Johnson, Leo Tolstoy, Sun Yat-sen; institutionally the Schalkenbach Foundation and Henry George School.
• Supporting evidence: Land rent could fund a large share of government (contested); LVT can replace capital taxes without efficiency loss (strong); Gaffney's hidden taxable capacity; ATCOR; Goodhart & Hudson stimulus model.
• Weak or missing: the full-replacement arithmetic is the contested step — ATCOR is largely untested empirically, and no modern economy funds itself from land revenue alone (Hong Kong and Singapore are partial precedents). Draft must not present sufficiency as settled.
• Objections: LVT can't raise enough revenue; transition wealth shock.
• Historical anchors: 1886 NYC mayoral election; single-tax colonies.
• Deployment: tax-simplification and libertarian-leaning audiences; note that most modern advocates soften to "a much larger land tax" rather than literal single-tax purism — the page should say so.

2. Tax Land, Not Labor — tax-land-not-labor (economic) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Taxes on wages and investment discourage the activity that creates wealth; a tax on land value discourages nothing, because the land is there regardless. So the burden should shift from labor and capital onto land.
• Who promotes it: Milton Friedman ("least bad tax"), William Vickrey, Joseph Stiglitz, Nicolaus Tideman; survey in The Modern Georgism of Respected Economists.
• Supporting evidence: the strongest-evidenced narrative of the twelve — LVT can replace capital taxes without efficiency loss (Bonnet et al.); landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants; a land value tax can be progressive (Schwerhoff et al., IMF); deadweight loss; Goodhart stimulus.
• Weak or missing: magnitudes in calibrated models vary; clean large-scale "big shift" natural experiments are rare (Estonia, Denmark, Pennsylvania are partial).
• Objections: land can't be assessed; LVT is just a property tax.
• Deployment: economists, centrists, fiscal-policy audiences. Lead with efficiency, close with progressivity — the equity-plus-efficiency combination is the hook.

3. The Unearned Increment — unearned-increment-narrative (moral) — ✅ DRAFTED

The exemplar page; see it for the full map. Distinct from the unearned increment concept page, which defines the term; the narrative page covers its persuasive career from Mill through the 1909 People's Budget to modern capitalization evidence.

4. The Rentier Economy — the-rentier-economy (economic) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: A rising share of income flows to those who own assets and extract economic rent — above all land under housing — rather than to those who produce; taxing rent redirects reward from extraction to creation.
• Who promotes it: Michael Hudson (FIRE-sector analysis), Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins.
• Supporting evidence: capital-share rise is land (strong: Rognlie, Bonnet et al.); high land rents suppress productivity (emerging: Bakker); Mapping Modern Economic Rents; rent-seeking; Rothschild & Scheuer; Richards, Taxes and Rents; digital-age rents.
• Weak or missing: where "rent" ends and legitimate return begins is contested; the extension from land to platform and financial rents is analytical, not settled; and the step from diagnosis to land taxation specifically needs explicit argument.
• Objections: the Austrian critique (denies the land/capital distinction the narrative rests on).
• Deployment: left-leaning, heterodox, and inequality-focused audiences; the Rognlie decomposition of Piketty's data is the anchor fact.

5. The Community Creates Land Value — community-creates-land-value (moral) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Location value is produced by the surrounding community and by public investment, not by the titleholder — so recovering it for public use returns value to the people who created it.
• Who promotes it: Henry George, Joseph Stiglitz (via the Henry George Theorem), Ebenezer Howard; institutionally the Lincoln Institute under the label land value capture.
• Supporting evidence: public investment capitalizes into land (strong); public goods fundable from land rent (Arnott & Stiglitz, Stiglitz 1977, Behrens et al. second-best); tax capitalization.
• Weak or missing: the HGT equality holds only under optimality conditions; isolating how much of a parcel's value a specific public action created is empirically hard.
• Objections: transition wealth shock; assessment.
• Deployment: local officials and infrastructure-funding debates; make it concrete ("who paid for the subway that raised that lot's value?"). Overlaps deliberately with the unearned-increment narrative: this one is forward-looking finance, that one is backward-looking fairness.

6. Land Speculation Causes Boom and Bust — land-speculation-causes-cycles (economic) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Recurrent land-price speculation, financed by credit, drives the boom and the crash (advocates describe an ~18-year cycle); taxing land values would dampen the cycle at its source.
• Who promotes it: Fred Harrison (called the 2008 crash in advance), Fred Foldvary, Akhil Patel, Mason Gaffney; George's own version is in Progress and Poverty (research page).
• Supporting evidence: LVT dampens land speculation (moderate); speculative vacancy; Oxford Review survey; land monopoly.
• Weak or missing: the cycle literature is largely practitioner-authored, not peer-reviewed; the prediction record is anecdotal rather than systematic; direct causal evidence that LVT dampens cycles is thin (Estonia is suggestive only). The wiki also lacks an objection page for the mainstream view that cycles are chiefly monetary/financial — flag for the objections backlog.
• Objections: none on file yet (see gap above).
• Deployment: investors, macro commentators, and post-crash windows; keep the deterministic "18 years" attributed to Harrison/Patel, never asserted.

7. The Housing Crisis Is a Land Crisis — the-housing-crisis-is-a-land-crisis (practical) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Housing is expensive mainly because the land under it is expensive; taxing land values discourages speculation and underuse and — with permissive zoning — channels land into homes.
• Who promotes it: Lars Doucet, Josh Ryan-Collins, Dominic Frisby; Prosper Australia (speculative-vacancy studies), Center for Land Economics.
• Supporting evidence: split-rate increases construction (moderate–strong: Oates & Schwab, Plassmann & Tideman); LVT improves housing affordability (contested — the page itself says LVT is not sufficient alone); capital-share rise is land (housing is the channel); Detroit LVT proposal.
• Weak or missing: the direct affordability evidence is weaker than the construction evidence, and Singapore/Hong Kong show value capture without cheap housing. The page must foreground the zoning pairing, not bury it.
• Objections: capture didn't make housing cheap; LVT is just a property tax.
• Deployment: YIMBY/urbanist audiences and city politics; present LVT and zoning reform as a single package to preempt the strongest objection.

8. A Dividend from Common Wealth — citizens-dividend-narrative (moral) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Rent from land and natural resources is common property; paid out as an equal citizen's dividend, it gives every person a visible stake in the commons — a basic income funded by what nobody made.
• Who promotes it: Henry George (public spending of rent), Alanna Hartzok; the geolibertarian strand (geolibertarianism) and parts of the modern UBI movement.
• Supporting evidence: resource-rent dividends work (strong — decades of the Alaska Permanent Fund); land rent could fund government (contested — sets the ceiling on dividend size); resource rents.
• Weak or missing: Alaska's dividend is oil rent, not location rent — no jurisdiction has run a land-rent dividend at scale; and Colombia evidence warns that rent windfalls can weaken local tax effort and accountability. The narrative page must carry both.
• Objections: not enough revenue.
• Deployment: UBI and tech audiences; populist "your share of what we own together" framing; Alaska's cross-partisan durability is the anchor fact.

9. Green Georgism: Charging for the Earth — ecological-rent (environmental) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Pollution, carbon emission, and resource extraction are uncompensated takings of common natural wealth; charging for them extends the Georgist rent principle to ecology (ecological Georgism), and LVT itself is said to promote compact land use over sprawl.
• Who promotes it: Alanna Hartzok, Karl Fitzgerald; Earthsharing Australia.
• Supporting evidence: resource-rent dividends work (for the capture side); Tallinn density findings (suggestive on compactness); resource rents.
• Weak or missing: the largest evidence gap of the twelve. The wiki has no research page on LVT and sprawl or environmental outcomes, and none connecting carbon pricing to the rent framework. Source before drafting; expect heavy use of "advocates argue".
• Objections: LVT hurts farmers (adjacent rural/land-use worry); no ecological-specific objection page exists yet.
• Deployment: climate-concerned audiences; frame carbon charges as rent for using a commons rather than a punitive tax; do not oversell LVT itself as climate policy.

10. The Tax You Can't Dodge — the-tax-you-cant-dodge (practical) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Land cannot be hidden, moved offshore, or re-domiciled; its ownership and value are public and local. That makes land the hardest tax base to avoid in an era of international tax competition and avoidance.
• Who promotes it: Dominic Frisby, Lars Doucet; the "it can be taxed" theme of Bonnet et al..
• Supporting evidence: IMF, Taxing Immovable Property; World Bank property-tax determinants; property tax raises welfare in developing countries (Brockmeyer et al.).
• Weak or missing: avoidance mutates rather than vanishes — assessment appeals, exemption lobbying, and political suppression of valuations (Murphy & Seegert document systematic underassessment); ownership can still be obscured through entities even when the land cannot move. The page must treat "can't dodge" as relative, not absolute.
• Objections: land can't be assessed.
• Deployment: anti-avoidance politics and state-capacity/development audiences; works across the spectrum wherever "the rich don't pay tax" resonates.

11. The Corruption of Economics — the-corruption-of-economics (historical) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Advocates — principally Gaffney — argue that early neoclassical economists, some patronized by landed and railroad interests, collapsed land into "capital" and thereby buried the classical three-factor analysis and George's reform case. (Named for the 1994 Gaffney–Harrison book.)
• Who promotes it: Mason Gaffney (Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem), Fred Harrison.
• Supporting evidence: Gaffney's own documented history is the primary source; circumstantially, land's disappearance from and return to mainstream analysis (Land is Back, modern Georgism of respected economists).
• Weak or missing: the intentionality thesis is contested historiography resting heavily on one scholar's work, with no independent peer-reviewed replication in the wiki; standard histories attribute the two-factor simplification to analytic convenience. The page must be written entirely as "Gaffney argues" and should link a counter-source once one is registered — flag for sourcing.
• Objections: none on file; the mainstream-historiography counter needs a home.
• Deployment: movement insiders and heterodox academics; use sparingly with general audiences (easily heard as conspiracy). Its best general-audience use is answering "if this is so good, why haven't I heard of it?"

12. The Great Land Robbery — the-great-land-robbery (historical) — ✅ DRAFTED

• Core claim: Existing land titles descend from enclosure, conquest, and dispossession, not from anyone's production; capturing land rent going forward is restitution that requires no confiscation — the bloodless remedy, advocates argue.
• Who promotes it: Henry George (The Land Question; A Perplexed Philosopher against Spencer's recantation), Alfred Russel Wallace (land nationalisation), Leo Tolstoy.
• Supporting evidence: primarily historical-textual (the George works above); land monopoly for the structural claim.
• Weak or missing: the wiki has no page on enclosure or colonial land history — the narrative's factual backbone needs dedicated sourcing; and historical injustice does not by itself select LVT over rival remedies (restitution-in-kind, redistribution) — that bridge argument must be attributed, not assumed. Handle indigenous land claims with care: rent capture is not "land back".
• Objections: transition wealth shock (today's owners bought in good faith — the strongest reply).
• Deployment: justice-oriented audiences; emotionally the most powerful and the easiest to overreach — keep every historical claim specific, dated, and sourced.

Cross-cutting notes for drafters

• Audience map: economists → 2; left/heterodox → 4, 12; libertarian → 1, 10; urbanist/YIMBY → 7; climate → 9; UBI/tech → 8; local government → 5; investors → 6; broad-moral → 3; movement-internal → 11.
• Evidence-strength ranking (strongest first, per the outcome pages): 2 · 5 · 3 · 4 · 7 · 10 · 8 · 6 · 1 · 12 · 11 · 9. Narratives 9, 11, and 12 shipped 2026-07-05 after their prerequisite sources were registered (Barnes, Fairlie, Blaug). All twelve narratives are now drafted.
• Inbound links: when a narrative page ships, add a link to it from its concept twin (e.g., unearned increment → the narrative page), from the relevant outcome pages' See Also, and from Georgism once a "Narratives" section exists there.

See Also

• Narrative: The Unearned Increment — the exemplar page
• Georgism · Land Value Tax — the ideas the narratives sell
• LVT research priorities — the evidence agenda the gaps above feed into

Sources

1. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 — used for the origin of narratives 1, 3, 5, 6, and 12 in George's own argument.
2. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, Book V, Ch. II, §5. https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP.html — used for the pre-Georgist lineage of narrative 3 (the unearned increment).
3. Murray Rothbard, "The Single Tax: Economic and Moral Implications," FEE, 1957. https://mises.org/library/single-tax-economic-and-moral-implications — used as the representative opposing source narratives 3 and 4 must answer.
4. Evidence mappings above otherwise cite the wiki's own outcomes/ and research/ pages, each of which carries its external citations (navigation per EDITORIAL.md §1.7).