Edwin R. A. Seligman
Columbia public-finance economist (1861–1939), author of The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation (1899) — the founding text of tax-incidence theory — and the single tax's most formidable academic critic, debating the question publicly from the 1890 Saratoga session onward.
Overview
Edwin R. A. Seligman (1861–1939), professor of political economy at Columbia, was the leading American public-finance economist of his generation; his The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation (1899, 2nd ed. 1902) founded the systematic study of who actually bears a tax.[1] He was also the single tax's most formidable academic critic: he addressed the famous single-tax debate at Saratoga (September 1890) opposite Henry George's position, and his incidence framework became the professional lens through which the movement's claims were judged.[1][2] The wiki's 1914 Johnson critique page documents the next generation of that academic opposition; Gaffney's corruption thesis reads Seligman's role adversarially — reported there as Gaffney's argument.
Ironically, the incidence tradition Seligman founded underpins the modern Georgist-friendly finding that a land tax is not shifted to tenants (landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants).
See Also
- Richard T. Ely — the institutional wing of the same academic generation
- Johnson (1914), The Case Against the Single Tax
- Tax incidence on the wiki: Landlords cannot pass LVT to tenants
Sources
- "Edwin R. A. Seligman," Wikipedia · Online Books Page — used for biography and Shifting and Incidence editions (A-claims).
- Single Tax Discussion, Saratoga, September 1890 (Address of Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman) — used for the 1890 debate role (A-claim; snippet-corroborated). [VERIFY: exact venue/proceedings citation for the Saratoga session on direct read.]