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The Evidence Dashboard
The whole graded case at a glance: every problem and benefit claim in the wiki, with its evidence grade, supporting and challenging study counts, and a one-line verdict.
The Evidence Dashboard
What this is
The Evidence Dashboard is the whole graded case on one page: every empirical claim the wiki makes about geoism — the problems it diagnoses and the benefits its policies deliver — with the strength of the evidence, how many studies stand behind each claim, how many push back, and a one-line verdict you can quote. It is built for the advocate who needs ammunition fast and the policymaker's staffer who needs to know exactly how far each claim can be pushed.
How to read the grades
The Strength badge is the wiki's honest read of the evidence, not a cheer:
- Strong — replicated, quasi-experimental, or near-unanimous; state it plainly.
- Moderate–Strong / Moderate — real evidence, but with contested magnitudes or a thinner causal chain; attribute it ("studies find…").
- Mixed / Contested — the evidence cuts both ways; lead with the caveat.
- Emerging — promising but still thin; flag it as early.
The land-core claims grade strongest; every step out toward resource, monopoly, and innovation rents is more contested, and the grades say so. The Supporting and Challenging counts are the research pages wired into each claim — click through to read them, and see How We Verify for what each grade requires.
New here? Start at Start Here. Building an argument? Take the Advocate's Arsenal; briefing a decision-maker? the Policymaker's Brief. Or enter by topic: Housing · Cycles & Crises · Tax Design · Climate & the Commons · History & People · Case Studies · Objections Answered · The Rent Frontier.
Problems — what geoism diagnoses
Empirical claims about how the world goes wrong when rent is left uncaptured. See the full lane at Problems.
| Claim | Strength | Supporting | Challenging | One-line verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Most of the modern rise in the capital share is land, not capital | Strong | 6 | 2 | The much-discussed rise in capital's share of income is, on decomposition, overwhelmingly a rise in the value of land under housing — vindicating a core Georgist claim. |
| Housing unaffordability is a land problem, not a construction-cost problem | Strong | 6 | 0 | Where housing is expensive, decomposition shows it is the land under the house — not the cost of building it — that has appreciated: 80% of the post-1950 global house-price boom is land, and in constrained US metros land is the gap between price and build cost. |
| The growth of modern banking is largely mortgage credit against land | Strong | 5 | 0 | Over the past century the expansion of banking in advanced economies has been, above all, the expansion of mortgage lending — and the value that lending is secured against is overwhelmingly land, not buildings. |
| Homelessness is a housing-cost problem | Strong | 5 | 1 | Which U.S. cities have high homelessness is explained by rent levels and rental vacancy rates, not by local rates of mental illness, drug use, or poverty — poorer cities often have less homelessness. |
| Public goods can be funded from the land rent they create | Strong | 5 | 0 | Under optimal conditions, the land rent generated by public goods equals their cost — so capturing land rent can finance them with no other tax. |
| Public investment capitalizes into nearby land values | Strong | 5 | 0 | Transit lines, parks, and public services raise the value of nearby land — the empirical foundation for the Henry George Theorem and land value capture. |
| The young are increasingly locked out of land wealth | Strong | 5 | 0 | UK 30-year-olds are half as likely to own a home as their parents were; OECD house prices grew three times faster than median incomes; US millennial net worth ran ~40% below Gen X at the same age. |
| Corporate profits increasingly reflect economic rents | Moderate–Strong | 9 | 1 | A converging empirical literature finds US corporate profits have risen far beyond competitive returns — markups, pure-profit shares, and firm-level return dispersion all point to growing economic rents, extending the Georgist rent analysis beyond land. |
| Rising land values and housing costs drive poverty | Moderate | 6 | 0 | Housing costs now determine who counts as poor in America — renters' supplemental poverty rate is 23.9% vs 5.7% for mortgaged owners — while rents have outrun renter incomes 21% to 2% since 2001, and the long-run rise in housing costs is driven by land prices, not construction. |
| Rent-seeking drags economic growth | Moderate | 5 | 1 | When capturing existing wealth pays better than creating new wealth, talent and effort flow into rent-seeking and growth suffers — the mainstream-economics core of the Georgist diagnosis, with strong theory and historical evidence but contested magnitudes. |
| Land underuse and speculative vacancy persist in high-demand cities | Moderate | 4 | 0 | Even where housing demand is most acute, homes sit empty for years and valuable land is used far below its potential — documented by quasi-experimental tax evidence from France, vacant-lot price data from US metros, and water-meter counts in Melbourne. |
| High land rents suppress productivity | Emerging | 5 | 0 | High urban land costs price the most productive workers and firms out of the best locations, misallocating labour and capital and lowering aggregate productivity. |
| Land rent could fund a large share of government | Contested | 10 | 0 | Estimates of total land rent suggest it could fund a substantial fraction — by some accounts most — of government, though figures are sensitive to assumptions. |
Benefits — what geoist policy delivers
Measured effects of capturing rent and pricing the commons. See the full lane at Benefits.
| Claim | Strength | Supporting | Challenging | One-line verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Landlords cannot pass a land value tax on to tenants | Strong | 12 | 4 | Because land supply is fixed, the economic incidence of a land value tax falls on the landowner — capitalized into lower land prices, not shifted to tenants through higher rents. |
| LVT can replace capital taxes without efficiency loss | Strong | 8 | 0 | Shifting tax from capital to land raises welfare: land taxes carry no deadweight loss while capital taxes discourage investment. |
| A land value tax can be progressive | Strong | 7 | 2 | Because land ownership is concentrated among the wealthy, a land value tax falls disproportionately on high-wealth households — making it both efficient and progressive. |
| Capturing resource rent works — where institutions are strong | Strong | 7 | 0 | High-rate capture of natural-resource rent is workable and durable: Norway taxes petroleum at a 78% marginal rate on a cash-flow basis, has banked over $2 trillion in the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, and spends only ~3% a year — the textbook escape from the resource curse. |
| Congestion pricing reduces traffic and congestion | Strong | 6 | 0 | Charging for scarce peak road space produces large, measured falls in traffic and congestion wherever it has been tried — Singapore (1975), London (2003), Stockholm (2006), New York (2025) — and Stockholm's cost-benefit analysis, built on measured data, shows the social benefits recover the system's cost in about four years. |
| Rent-targeting corporate taxes reduce debt bias without penalizing marginal investment | Strong | 6 | 1 | Corporate tax bases that exempt the normal return and tax only above-normal returns — the ACE and cash-flow designs — demonstrably remove the tax subsidy to leverage and, in the expensing variant, stimulate investment. |
| Resource-rent dividends are workable and durable | Strong | 6 | 1 | Alaska's decades-long Permanent Fund Dividend shows that capturing natural-resource rent and distributing it as a citizen's dividend is administratively and politically durable. |
| Split-rate taxation increases urban construction | Moderate–Strong | 14 | 2 | Across US, Australian and Finnish case studies, shifting property tax off buildings and onto land is followed by more construction — the effect Georgist theory predicts. |
| Carbon pricing cuts emissions — modestly, and without wrecking growth | Moderate–Strong | 7 | 0 | Pricing the scarce right to emit — charging for use of the atmospheric commons — measurably reduces emissions wherever it has been tried, at little cost to growth: British Columbia's revenue-neutral carbon tax cut per-capita fuel use ~19% while GDP outpaced the rest of Canada; a meta-analysis of 80 causal evaluations, cross-country and EU-ETS evidence agree the effect is real, if modest. |
| Taxing land and rents increases productivity | Moderate | 11 | 1 | Shifting taxes off work and investment onto land and rents removes deadweight loss and is associated with higher long-run GDP per capita — the least-harmful-tax evidence is strong, while direct evidence of productivity gains is more model-based and contested. |
| Land value taxation dampens land speculation | Moderate | 8 | 0 | By imposing an annual cost on holding land, LVT reduces the incentive to hold sites idle for speculative gain — shrinking the booms and busts of the land cycle. |
| Rent dividends reduce poverty and inequality | Moderate | 7 | 1 | Descriptive and causal evidence from Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, a second oil-royalty-funded dividend in Maricá, Brazil, and a peer-reviewed global simulation indicate that distributing rent as equal per-capita dividends reduces poverty and compresses the income distribution — though one econometric study finds inequality worsened. |
| Land value taxation reduces urban sprawl | Moderate | 6 | 3 | Split-rate taxation increases housing density in the locations where it is applied — the mechanism anti-sprawl arguments predict — but whether this reduces sprawl at the metropolitan level depends on where the tax is adopted. |
| Higher property-tax rates raise welfare in developing countries | Moderate | 6 | 0 | Causal evidence from Mexico shows raising property-tax rates increases welfare, and a randomized DR Congo experiment confirms property tax's fiscal value — though both find that weak enforcement can make rate increases self-defeating. |
| Land value taxation can improve housing affordability | Mixed | 11 | 3 | LVT reliably lowers land prices (tax capitalization) and encourages construction — but its effect on rents actually paid is mixed, and affordability gains require permissive zoning; capturing land value alone need not make housing cheap. |