Lars Doucet on the Dwarkesh Podcast

Summary

Released 9 January 2023 — "Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high" (the show was then still called The Lunar Society) — this roughly 1h40m episode has host Dwarkesh Patel interview Lars Doucet, author of Land Is a Big Deal, about Georgism, land value taxation, and assessment. Patel calls it "one of my best episodes ever," and it is frequently recommended as the best single-sitting introduction to the modern Georgist case.

Why It Matters

The conversation covers the whole arc — why land is economically distinct, whether values are large enough to matter, the incidence and assessment objections, and practical implementation. Patel said it "completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it." As accessible audio, it has been a major on-ramp for newcomers. The episode draws directly on the research Doucet began after his prize-winning ACX book review of Progress and Poverty and his Does Georgism Work? series.

What the Episode Covers

The published timestamps map the conversation's full arc: Georgism defined; "Metaverse Housing Crises" (Doucet's virtual-land case that scarcity of location reappears even in digital worlds — see virtual land); speculation and frontiers; the social value of search; "Will Georgism Destroy The Economy?"; San Francisco's economics; land reform in the Asian Tigers; libertarian Georgism; the transition question; Doucet's assessment startup; and a closing section titled "Someone Is Always Collecting Rents."[1]

Substantive positions Doucet takes on-air (all verifiable in the published transcript):[1]

• Magnitude. "There's $44 trillion of land value in America and I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. We would probably do less than that in practice" — but even the low end could fully pay for Social Security or defense.
• The search-theoretic critique. Doucet answers Bryan Caplan's discovery objection directly: the "critique only applies to a 100% LVT... the most extreme Georgists I know are only advocating for an 85% land value tax," which leaves a return to discovery — and Caplan "doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation." (The academic version of this exchange is at Gochenour & Caplan and Foldvary's reply.)
• Severance taxes as geoism. He presents Norway's oil severance tax as "essentially a land value tax but of a different kind" and "a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse" — the rent-gradient extension covered at resource rents.
• Assessment and regressivity. He argues most analyses finding land taxes regressive are "mostly done on the basis of our current assessments," which "could be massively improved" — the improvement agenda behind his assessment startup ValueBase (whose lead investor, Patel notes, is Sam Altman).

Context and Reception

Patel's episode page opens: "One of my best episodes ever," and notes Doucet's book had been "praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith."[1] The episode (1h40m, released while the show was still called The Lunar Society) is the audio companion to the Doucet corpus this wiki carries — the ACX review, the Does Georgism Work? series, and Land is a Big Deal — and is the piece most often recommended to newcomers who prefer listening to reading.

See Also

• Objection: search-theoretic critique
• Gochenour & Caplan (2013) — the academic form of the discovery objection Doucet answers on-air
• Land is a Big Deal (book) — the book the episode promotes and summarizes
• Lars Doucet · Virtual Land · Resource Rents

Sources

1. "Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high," Dwarkesh Podcast (then The Lunar Society), 9 Jan 2023, 1h40m. dwarkesh.com (episode page with full transcript) · YouTube — used for the timestamps/topic list (episode page and transcript fetched and read this session), Patel's framing ("One of my best episodes ever"; it "completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it"), the $44-trillion/$4-trillion magnitude claims, the 85%-LVT answer to Caplan, the Norway severance-tax passage, the assessment-regressivity argument, and the ValueBase/Sam Altman detail (all quoted passages verified verbatim against the transcript).