Francis A. Walker
American economist, first president of the American Economic Association and third president of MIT, who wrote Land and Its Rent (1883) as a direct critique of Henry George's Progress and Poverty.
Overview
Francis Amasa Walker (July 2, 1840 – January 5, 1897) was an American economist, statistician, and former Union Army general who served as the third president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1881–1897) and, from 1885 to 1892, as the first president of the American Economic Association.[1] He is separately known in the history of economics for demolishing the classical "wage-fund" doctrine in his The Wages Question (1876).[1][2]
Beginning shortly after the 1879 publication of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Walker became one of the era's most prominent academic critics of George's land-value doctrine, engaging him in public debate over land, rent, and taxation.[1][2] Walker set out his rival theory of rent — treating it as a category continuous with ordinary factor returns rather than George's unique, unearned surplus — in Land and Its Rent (1883), a book based on a series of Lowell Institute/Harvard lectures written explicitly against George's argument.[1][2] As his career advanced, Walker moved further toward the economic establishment's conservative wing, becoming a sharper critic of George, socialists, and Gilded Age populists generally.[1]
See Also
- Henry George — the target of Walker's Land and Its Rent and his opponent in the 1879-era public debate over land and rent
- Era Seligman — fellow AEA-generation economist and the single tax's most formidable later academic critic
- Richard T. Ely — co-founder of the American Economic Association alongside Walker, in the same institutional generation of land-economics critics
- The Corruption of Economics — Gaffney's thesis situating establishment economists like Walker within a broader account of the profession's response to George
Sources
- "Francis Amasa Walker," Wikipedia — used for biography (birth/death, MIT presidency, AEA presidency, wage-fund work, and the George debate and Land and Its Rent).
- Mason Gaffney & Fred Harrison, The Corruption of Economics — the discovery source for this page; Gaffney's essay situates Walker among the establishment economists whose engagement with George he reads as part of the profession's marginalization of land-value taxation.