Jeffery Johnson Smith

Overview

Jeffery Johnson Smith (publishing under the byline Jeffery J. Smith) is a Georgist writer and long-serving chief editor of Progress.org, the online publication associated with the modern geoist movement.[1] In his 2020 book Counting Bounty: The Quest to Know the Worth of Earth (Trine Day LLC), Smith produced an original synthesis estimating the total value of land and natural resources in the United States, building on the transaction-based land-value work of David Albouy and colleagues and adding categories such as farmland and federal lands.[2][3] Lars Doucet's Land is a Big Deal (2022) surveys twelve US land-value estimation methods in its Ch. 14 comparison table and lists Smith's figure at roughly $44 trillion — the highest of the estimates tabulated there, above the Federal Reserve/Yglesias cost-approach estimate (~$24T) and the Larson (2015) hedonic estimate (~$33T).[2] That figure feeds the wiki's broader claim that land rent could fund a large share of government.

Smith's estimate is an advocate's aggregation rather than an official government or peer-reviewed academic figure, and Doucet's own comparison table presents it alongside more conservative estimates rather than as a settled consensus number.[2] A primary-source, chapter-and-page account of Smith's exact methodology in Counting Bounty — beyond the secondhand summary in Doucet (2022) — has not been consulted for this page.

See Also

• Land is a Big Deal — the book whose Ch. 14 land-value comparison table cites Smith's $44T estimate
• Land rent could fund a large share of government — the claim page Smith's estimate feeds
• Lars Doucet — author of the book that surveys and contextualizes Smith's figure
• David Albouy — source of the transaction-based estimate Smith's figure builds on

Sources

1. Progress.org author page for Jeffery J. Smith — used for his role as chief editor of Progress.org and his standing as a Georgist writer. progress.org
2. Lars A. Doucet, Land is a Big Deal: Why rent is too high, wages too low, and what we can do about it (Shack Simple Press, 2022), Ch. 14 — used for the ~$44 trillion "Smith (2020)" estimate and its place in the book's twelve-method US land-value comparison table. Summarized on the wiki's book page.
3. Jeffery Johnson Smith, Counting Bounty: The Quest to Know the Worth of Earth (Chicago: Trine Day LLC, 2020) — the primary source of the estimate discussed here; not independently read for this stub. Barnes & Noble listing