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The building blocks of Geoism — economic rent, land value, and the mechanics of capturing publicly created value. Start here to get the vocabulary the rest of the wiki relies on.
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The recurrent ~18-year cycle of land prices, speculation, and credit that culminates in a property-driven economic crash — used to forecast the 1990 and 2008 downturns.
Agglomeration economies are the productivity spillovers that arise from the spatial concentration of economic activity in cities, making urban land more valuable and explaining why restricting growth in productive cities has large aggregate costs.
The legal right to build in the space above a parcel of land, separable and sellable independent of the land itself — a private-market illustration that location value can be unbundled and priced, most famously when Tiffany & Co. sold its unused air rights for the Trump Tower site.
A corporate tax design that deducts a notional 'normal' return on equity, leaving only above-normal returns — economic rent by construction — in the tax base. Tried in Belgium, Italy, Croatia and elsewhere; recommended by the Mirrlees Review; every full European version has since been repealed.
Buying a public company below the market value of its landholdings, then breaking it up and selling the land, exposes how corporate balance sheets and share prices routinely understate — or fail to price at all — the land rent a firm sits on.
ATCOR — “All Taxes Come Out of Rent” — is Mason Gaffney’s theorem that taxes on labour, capital, and trade ultimately fall on land rent, the residual left after other factors earn market returns. If it holds, shifting taxes onto land rent is self-financing — though it remains an untested hypothesis.
Most of the money supply in modern economies is created not by central banks but by commercial banks, as a byproduct of lending — and that lending is disproportionately secured against real estate, tying money creation directly to land value.
A one-off charge on the increase in land value caused by public decisions — planning permission, infrastructure, rezoning — as distinct from recurrent land value taxation. The UK has repeatedly attempted and repealed betterment levies.
The general concept of recurrent economic boom-bust cycles, presenting the Georgist land-speculation reading alongside the mainstream credit-cycle reading — two accounts that converge on property and credit but diverge on causation.
How a land value tax scores against the two classical tests of a good tax: Adam Smith's four maxims (1776) and Henry George's four conditions (1879) — with the revenue-sufficiency caveat carried honestly.
The ratio (net annual income ÷ asset price) used to convert a land selling-value estimate into an annual rental-income estimate, or vice versa — the stock-to-flow conversion every LVT revenue projection depends on.
A business tax on net cash flows with immediate expensing of investment: the normal return drops out of the base in present value, leaving only economic rent. Canonized by the Meade Report (1978); the destination-based variant (DBCFT) nearly became US law in 2017; Norway's petroleum tax became...
The distribution of collected land and resource rent equally to all citizens as a cash dividend — proposed by Henry George and exemplified by the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Royal decrees in Bronze Age Mesopotamia (c. 2400–1400 BC) cancelling agrarian debts, freeing debt-bondservants, and restoring forfeited land to smallholders — cited by Michael Hudson as deep-historical precedent for treating unchecked rent and debt claims as a threat to social stability.
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 thesis that free frontier land was the 'safety valve' of American opportunity — and the Georgist reading, via Phillip J. Anderson, that its 1890 closure removed the free margin that had kept wages up and land speculation in check.
The macro-finance mechanism by which the market value of an asset used as loan collateral, especially land, determines how much credit can be created against it — producing a feedback loop between asset prices and credit supply.
The EU's largest budget program pays farmers largely by land area — and a body of European Commission data and academic research finds much of that spending capitalizes into land rents and prices rather than farm income.
The UN Law of the Sea principle declaring deep seabed minerals beyond national jurisdiction the common heritage of mankind, with rents to be shared among all states — a resource-rent-as-common-property idea far more contested in practice than land value taxation.
A nonprofit that holds land in common and leases it to residents, capturing rising land value for the community — a Georgist principle applied at neighbourhood scale, though by removing land from the market rather than taxing its rent.
The state power to acquire private land, with compensation, for a public purpose — called compulsory purchase in the UK and eminent domain in the US. A key instrument for public land value capture when compensation is set at existing-use rather than speculative value.
Charging drivers for the scarce, commonly-owned road space they occupy at peak times — the road-space analogue of charging for land. Pioneered in theory by William Vickrey; implemented in Singapore (1975), London (2003) and Stockholm (2006), each with large, measured traffic reductions. The...
An informal central-bank tool directing the volume and sector of bank lending — used by Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to steer credit toward production and, at times, away from land speculation.
The proposal, developed by Lanier, Weyl and coauthors and popularized in Radical Markets Ch. 5, that platforms should treat user-generated data as compensated labor rather than a free byproduct of using a service — the leading redistribution mechanism for platform/data rents.
The loss of economic welfare when a tax drives the quantity traded below its efficient level, preventing mutually beneficial transactions. Because land's supply is fixed, a tax on land value causes no such loss — the core efficiency argument for taxing land.
Excess Burdens Come Out of Rents — Gaffney's companion to ATCOR, arguing that the deadweight losses of distortionary taxes also fall on land rent, further expanding the LVT base when such taxes are abolished.
The extension of Georgist rent-capture to all natural resources and environmental externalities — taxing pollution, carbon, and resource extraction as forms of rent.
The payment to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it in its current use — a surplus arising from scarcity or privileged position rather than from effort. For land, whose supply cannot be increased, the whole rent is this kind of unearned surplus.
The legal conversion of commonly-used land — open fields and commons — into exclusive private property, extinguishing the use-rights of commoners. In England, carried out on a vast scale by parliamentary Inclosure Acts; the historical mechanism of land dispossession that the Georgist land-robbery na
Tax-free, deregulated zones designed to spur investment in depressed areas — but the tax relief and infrastructure spending inside them is often capitalized into land prices rather than passed through to workers or firms.
The classical division of production into land, labour, and capital — each with its own return of rent, wages, and interest — and the contested nineteenth-century shift that collapsed land into capital, erasing a distinction Georgists consider essential.
The process by which land and housing shift from being valued as places to live and work into being valued primarily as collateral and investment assets — driven by the feedback loop between mortgage credit and land prices.
Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate — an official national-accounts grouping that Michael Hudson turned into the analytical core of the rentier-economy critique: banks lend against land, credit capitalizes into land prices, and much recorded financial 'output' is a claim on rent. The scale data,...
The economic system in which economic rents of every kind — land, resources, carbon, spectrum, road space, monopoly privilege, finance, platforms, IP — are captured for public good rather than privatized. Georgism generalized: this wiki's full scope, with the rent gradient kept honest.
A political philosophy combining libertarian individual rights with the Georgist principle that land rent belongs to the community — LVT as the one legitimate tax.
The political-economic philosophy, named for Henry George, holding that the value of land and natural resources is created by the community and therefore belongs to the public, while the fruits of individual labour and capital should be left untaxed with those who produce them.
An umbrella concept, drawn from Phillip Anderson's cycle history, for state-created exclusivities — land titles, banking charters, broadcast spectrum, taxi medallions — whose value is capitalised into a saleable price much like land rent.
The rent attributable to the land (location) itself, as distinct from the buildings on it — the specific quantity a land value tax targets. Distinct from the legal 'ground rent' a leaseholder pays a freeholder, which is a contract, not the economic thing.
A self-assessed property tax under which owners name their own price and must sell at it — a modern extension of Georgist principles popularized by Radical Markets.
The result that, under optimal conditions, the aggregate land rent of a community exactly equals the optimal spending on public goods — so a land tax can fund them with no other tax.
When a project needs many adjacent parcels, individual owners can block assembly or extort excess payment by refusing to sell — a bargaining failure that mechanism-design economists have tried to solve with auction and self-assessment schemes.
The speculative premium a buyer pays above a site's current-use value because of a realistic prospect — not yet a granted permission — that planning consent will make the land more valuable.
The pattern in which large diversified index funds hold significant stakes in multiple competing firms in the same industry — argued to soften competition and raise prices, e.g. airline fares an estimated 3-11% higher, without contributing to production.
A self-reinforcing loop in which mortgage credit bids up land prices, the resulting higher collateral values support even larger loans, and the cycle repeats until a shock triggers defaults and a crash — the macro-financial mechanism at the center of Ryan-Collins, Lloyd & Macfarlane's...
Imputed rent is the rental-equivalence method by which national accounts measure the housing services consumed by owner-occupiers, assigning a notional market rent to owner-occupied housing.
A patent or copyright is a government-granted temporary monopoly — a deliberately-created rent. It is the most contested rent in the Geoist file, because here the rent is supposed to BE the incentive. Yet the evidence that IP monopoly is necessary for innovation is surprisingly weak, and...
The biblical institution of Leviticus 25: every fiftieth year, agricultural land reverted to its original family holders and Hebrew debt-bondservants went free — a periodic redistribution premised on the principle that the land belongs to God and 'shall not be sold for ever.' Invoked in the Georgist
Nikolai Kondratiev's theory of ~50-60 year 'long waves' in commodity prices and technology, driven by successive clusters of innovation — the main rival long-cycle framework that Georgist land-cycle writers integrate with, and distinguish from, the 18-year land cycle.
Simon Kuznets's mainstream-recognized ~15–25 year medium-range economic swings in construction and demographic movement, cited by land-cycle Georgists as independent corroboration of the ~18-year land cycle.
The classical doctrine that a good's value is governed by the labor required to produce it — the theory of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx that the marginal revolution displaced, and that Georgism's rent-based case does not depend on.
The tradition holding that land is common property by natural right — that equal access to land is a precondition of justice — tracing from Spencer's early position through George's equal-rights claim to modern ecological framing.
Public purchase of land ahead of the development that will raise its value, so the increment accrues to the municipality rather than speculators — Stockholm built, per Fred Harrison, the largest municipal land bank in Western Europe, but it did not neutralize the land-speculation cycle.
A speculative episode in which land prices rise sharply above use-value fundamentals, driven by appreciation expectations and credit expansion, before crashing — distinct from housing/structure bubbles and from the general boom-bust cycle.
In Georgist analysis, land monopoly is the structural condition in which private landownership lets owners collect economic rent — value created by nature and community growth — without contributing to production, since land cannot be reproduced in response to price.
A planning mechanism, widely used across Asia and Germany, in which landowners' parcels are pooled, serviced with infrastructure, reconstituted into smaller plots, and returned — with the state recovering costs from a betterment charge or reserved land sales.
The practice of holding land for expected appreciation rather than productive use — driven by option value and low carrying costs, and distinct from speculative vacancy (a symptom) and the 18-year cycle (a pattern).
The broad family of public-finance tools that recover, for public benefit, the land-value increases created by public investment and community growth.
Taiwan's constitutionally rooted tax on the realized gain in a parcel's assessed land value between transactions, distinct from recurrent land value taxation and structurally related to betterment levies.
A levy on the unimproved value of land, excluding buildings and improvements — held by economists across the ideological spectrum to be the least distortionary of all taxes, because land's supply is fixed and cannot shrink in response to the tax.
Akhil Patel's name for the principle that land absorbs the gains of economic progress — infrastructure and growth raise land values while leaving landowners' costs unchanged, the mechanism behind capitalization and the 18-year land cycle.
As successive equal increments of labor and capital are applied to a fixed input like land, each increment eventually yields less additional output — the analytical foundation Ricardo built differential rent theory on.
Ricardo's principle that land rent is a differential surplus determined by the gap in productivity between superior land and the least productive (marginal) land in use — the theoretical engine Henry George generalised to the whole economy.
The Latin American Catholic movement — founded by Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971) — that reads the Gospel as a summons to liberate the poor from structural injustice. Its Georgist relevance is narrow and specific: Andelson & Dawsey's From Wasteland to Promised Land (1992)...
The least productive land in use sets the baseline for wages and the yardstick for rent: workers can earn no less than the margin offers, and landowners can charge no more than the excess above it. Ricardo's law of rent, George's law of wages, and the doctrine's modern career.
J.B. Clark's theory that each factor of production earns its marginal product — and its pivotal role in merging land into capital, which Gaffney identifies as the analytical move that erased the classical land-rent distinction and undercut Henry George's single-tax case.
The statistical toolkit — computer-assisted mass appraisal, hedonic regression, and cooperative-game separation methods — used by assessors to estimate land value separately from building value at scale.
Buyer-side market power — most commonly an employer's power to hold wages below the competitive level — that lets firms extract a rent from workers, extending rent analysis from sellers (land, monopoly) to a channel on the buying side of a market.
A 2021 NYSE/Intrinsic Exchange Group proposal to list companies holding rights to ecosystem services — carbon storage, clean water, biodiversity — as tradable securities. Withdrawn from SEC consideration in 2024; the frontier of privatizing ecological rent.
Local resident opposition to nearby development — often to protect the capitalized value of an existing home — that restricts housing and land-use supply; the political-economy mechanism behind persistent local scarcity.
Optimal city size is the population at which the marginal benefit of spreading public-goods costs over more residents equals the marginal cost of increased commuting and crowding. At this optimum, the Henry George Theorem holds: aggregate land rent exactly equals optimal public-goods expenditure.
The 18th-century French school holding that only land yields a true surplus, and that all taxation should therefore fall on land's net product alone — a doctrine Henry George later claimed as direct ancestry for his single tax.
The externality-pricing tradition that charges for socially costly use of shared resources — and its Georgist kinship, which frames pollution and extraction as unpriced takings from the commons.
The returns a handful of digital firms earn from network-effect moats, accumulated data, and gatekeeping — the 'land-like positions' of the digital economy. The most contested rent in the file, alongside IP: is big-tech profit unearned rent, or the quasi-rent that rewards genuine innovation? The...
The proof that, under constant returns to scale, paying every factor its marginal product exactly exhausts total output with no residual — Wicksteed's 1894 theorem, later tied to Euler's theorem and to the Henry George Theorem's rent-as-residual logic.
Mariana Mazzucato's term for the historically shifting line that national accounts draw between activity counted as productive output and activity treated as merely redistributive — and how rent, including land rent, can be recorded as production.
A political ideal of spreading property ownership widely across society, coined by British Conservatives in the 1920s and later adopted by John Rawls — the aspiration behind mass-homeownership policy that helped create the homevoter bloc opposed to land value taxation.
The state keeps title and leases land long-term instead of taxing it annually — Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canberra are the working examples. It captures land value at grant and renewal rather than as a flow, which is both its fiscal power and, for Georgists, its structural weakness.
A voting mechanism in which a voter buying n votes on an issue pays n² 'voice credits,' designed to let people express how strongly they feel, not just which side they favor. Popularized alongside the Georgist-adjacent Harberger tax in Radical Markets (2018).
Marshall's term for returns that look like rent in the short run but are incentive payments in the long run — the reward that motivated a sunk investment. The distinction between pure rent and quasi-rent is the load-bearing wall of the Geoist rent gradient: taxing the first is free, taxing the...
Eric Posner and Glen Weyl's 2018 program of market-design reforms — centered on the Harberger tax (COST) — that generalizes the Georgist logic of taxing self-assessed asset value beyond land to property and quasi-property generally.
Between roughly 1850 and 1871 the US federal government granted railroad companies well over 100 million acres of public land as a construction subsidy — a windfall Henry George attacked as a new landed monopoly, and whose Northern Pacific tranche helped trigger the Panic of 1873.
Tax-exempt investment vehicles created by US law in 1960 whose assets grew twentyfold in the early 1970s, financed largely by bank lending, before a wave of defaults in the mid-1970s — cited by land-cycle writers as a channel through which credit fuelled land speculation.
The use of economic or political power to capture existing wealth rather than create new value — a concept rooted in the analysis of land rent.
A rentier is an economic actor whose income derives from ownership of scarce assets — historically land, extended by modern critics to finance, IP, and digital platforms — rather than from productive labor or enterprise.
The standard method developers use to price land: expected sales revenue minus construction costs, finance costs, and required profit. It explains why land absorbs planning gain in full and why building costs do not set house prices.
The economic rent from natural resources — oil, minerals, spectrum, fisheries — which Georgist analysis treats like land rent: socially capturable without efficiency loss.
Fred Harrison's term for the ~20-year divergence in which returns to land rise while returns to capital fall, squeezing profits and driving the buildup to the 18-year land cycle's crash.
Homer Hoyt's 1939 theory that urban land values and residential districts grow outward in wedge-shaped sectors along transport corridors, not in Burgess's concentric rings — a model of the spatial structure of land value with a documented redlining legacy.
A tenant-farming arrangement, dominant in the post-Civil War American South, in which a landless cropper worked land for a share of the crop plus credit against it — a concrete case of near-total rent extraction from labor by landholders.
Henry George’s 1879 proposal to replace all taxes on income, trade, and production with a single tax on the annual rental value of land, excluding improvements — capturing for the public the value the community itself creates.
The assessed value of land alone, excluding improvements — the base for pure land value taxation and site value rating, distinguished from improved or capital value.
The observation that record-breaking tall buildings tend to be launched near credit-fueled land-price peaks and complete around the following downturn — cited by land-cycle writers as a speculation indicator, though formal statistical tests find no reliable predictive relationship.
A state-owned investment fund capitalized from resource rents or other public revenues, used to convert depleting windfalls into perpetual income — exemplified by Norway's save-and-budget model and Alaska's dividend model.
Spatial misallocation occurs when housing constraints and land-use restrictions in high-productivity cities prevent labor and capital from flowing to their most productive uses, reducing aggregate output and total factor productivity.
Auctioning the right to use scarce radio spectrum — a finite, publicly-owned natural resource — so the public captures its scarcity rent instead of gifting it to incumbents. Proposed by Ronald Coase in 1959, adopted by the FCC in 1994, and now the standard worldwide: over $200 billion raised in...
Land or housing deliberately held empty in anticipation of capital gains rather than rented or developed — the visible symptom LVT targets. Covers the option-value theory of why owners wait, the measurement methods, the historical record, and the honest caveats.
A property tax that applies a higher rate to land than to buildings — a practical, incremental step toward land value taxation used by many Pennsylvania cities.
The classical prediction, from Ricardo through Mill, that diminishing returns to land eventually drive profits and wages toward a bare minimum while rent absorbs the surplus of growth, ending economic expansion in a 'stationary state.'
The leading rival explanation for the falling labor share: technology-driven scale economies let a shrinking set of highly productive, high-markup 'superstar firms' capture growing market share — an efficiency story that limits how far the rent reading of factor-share trends can be pushed.
The process by which expected future taxes (or tax cuts) on land are reflected immediately in land prices — central to LVT incidence, the transition problem, ATCOR, and the empirical case that landlords cannot pass a land tax to tenants.
Fred Harrison's term (Ricardo's Law, 2006) for how landowners recover, and often exceed, their tax payments through untaxed land-value gains funded by public investment — making an apparently progressive tax system regressive in net effect.