Arnold Harberger

Overview

Arnold Carl Harberger (born July 27, 1924) is an American economist known for the "Harberger triangle" depiction of the efficiency cost of market distortions and for decades of influence over Latin American economic policy through students at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1953 to 1982 (part-time to 1991), and subsequently at UCLA, where he has been professor emeritus since 2014.[1] Among his former students are more than a dozen Latin American central-bank presidents and roughly fifty government ministers, giving his ideas an unusually direct route into policy.[1]

In a 1962 speech in Santiago, Chile, Harberger proposed a solution to corrupt or unreliable property-tax assessment in Latin America: let owners self-declare the value of their own property, publish the declared values, and require the owner to sell to any buyer willing to pay the declared price.[2] This self-assessed, forced-sale mechanism — later formalized as the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST) and popularly known as the Harberger tax — was revived and generalized to all property by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl in Radical Markets (2018), which frames it as a hybrid of Henry George's land value tax and Harberger's self-assessment scheme.[3]

See Also

• Harberger Tax (COST) — the mechanism named for Harberger's 1962 proposal
• Radical Markets — the Posner & Weyl book that revived and generalized his proposal
• Land Value Tax — the Georgist tax whose self-assessment problem Harberger's mechanism addresses
• Chicago — the school and city where Harberger spent most of his academic career

Sources

1. "Arnold Harberger," University of Chicago Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics faculty page, and UCLA Economics faculty page — used for biographical facts (birth year, Chicago 1953–1982/1984–1991, UCLA from 1984, emeritus 2014, "Harberger triangle," influence on Latin American policymakers). economics.uchicago.edu/directory/Arnold-C-Harberger · economics.ucla.edu/person/arnold-c-harberger/
2. Eric Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 57–58 — used for the account of Harberger's 1962 Santiago speech and the self-assessment/forced-sale proposal, including the quoted mechanism ("allow each … owner … to declare the value of his own property … and require that an owner sell his property to any bidder … willing to pay … the declared value," p. 58). See wiki book page.
3. Wiki page: Harberger Tax (COST) — used for the COST naming and its framing as a hybrid of George's land value tax and Harberger's self-assessment scheme.