Fred Foldvary

Overview

Fred Foldvary (1946–2021) was an American economist and a leading modern Georgist theorist, associated with the geolibertarian tradition. He worked on public-goods provision, the real-estate cycle, and the ethics of land.

Contributions

• Private provision of public goods. In The Private Provision of Public Goods and related work, Foldvary argued that public goods can be financed from the land rent they generate — a practical application of the Henry George Theorem, as in private communities and "proprietary" governance.
• Predicting 2008. In a 1997 article, Foldvary used the 18-year land cycle to forecast a major depression around 2008 — a prediction that, like Fred Harrison's, proved strikingly accurate.

Significance

Foldvary connected Georgism to public-choice and libertarian economics, arguing that capturing land rent makes limited, even voluntary, governance feasible.

See Also

• Kinetic and Potential Rent — his rent-estimation framework
• Johnson 1914 and Foldvary's rebuttal — his answer to the era's leading critique
• Henry George Theorem · 18-Year Land Cycle · Geolibertarianism
• Public Goods and Private Communities (1994) — his book on financing public goods from land rent
• Narrative: Land Speculation Causes Boom and Bust — the narrative his 1997 forecast supports

Sources

1. Fred Foldvary, Public Goods and Private Communities (1994) and "The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian Synthesis" (AJES, 1997) — used for his public-goods and cycle work (A/C-claims; see the synthesis page and the 2008 prediction record).