Lars Doucet

Overview

Lars Doucet is a Norwegian-Texan game developer, writer, and land-assessment entrepreneur who became one of the most influential popularisers of Georgism in the 2020s. His work reframed land value taxation for a technically literate online audience and is widely credited with reviving interest in Henry George's ideas in Silicon Valley, rationalist, and effective-altruist communities.

Contributions

• ACX Book Review Contest win (2021) — Doucet won first place in Scott Alexander's Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest with a review of Progress and Poverty, published 16 April 2021 and announced as the winner on 10 July 2021. The win led Alexander to invite Doucet back as a guest author, launching the Does Georgism Work? series that December.
• "Does Georgism Work?" — His three-part Astral Codex Ten series (2021–22) examined the main empirical objections to LVT (magnitude, incidence, assessment).
• Land Is a Big Deal (2022, Shack Simple Press) — A 400-page book expanding the series into the most accessible modern introduction to Georgism, synthesising twelve competing US land-value estimates ($19–65 trillion range), the Danish natural-experiment evidence on LVT capitalization, and modern mass-appraisal methods; praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, Noah Smith, and Richard Florida.
• Center for Land Economics — Doucet co-founded this US nonprofit with Greg Miller in February 2025. It builds practical land-assessment tools (the open-source LVTShift modelling platform) and has published empirical studies of vacant-land undervaluation in Baltimore and Maryland, directly addressing the assessment objection; the Center won a 2025 J.M.K. Innovation Prize.

Listening & Watching

Doucet is a frequent audio/video presence: his long-form conversation on the Dwarkesh Podcast is a widely recommended single-sitting introduction to Georgism, and he appears in several of the Georgism video explainers circulating on YouTube.

Significance

Doucet represents the contemporary, empirically minded wing of Georgism: less concerned with George's 19th-century rhetoric than with whether the policy survives modern scrutiny on data and implementation. His answer — that it largely does — brought a new generation to the movement.

See Also

• Scott Alexander — host of the 2021 ACX Book Review Contest Doucet's Progress and Poverty review won, the spark for Doucet's Georgism series
• Center for Land Economics — the land-assessment nonprofit he co-founded in 2025
• Book Review: Progress and Poverty (Doucet, ACX Contest Winner) — the 2021 review that launched the modern revival
• Henry George · Progress and Poverty · Objection: Land value can't be assessed accurately

Sources

1. Lars Doucet (2021), "Your Book Review: Progress and Poverty," Astral Codex Ten — used for the contest win, its 16 April 2021 publication and 10 July 2021 first-place announcement, and the "Norwegian-Texan game designer" self-description (A-claims). wiki summary
2. Lars Doucet (2021–22), Does Georgism Work? — used for the ACX series and its reception (A-claims). wiki summary
3. Lars Doucet (2022), Land Is a Big Deal — used for the book's scope, land-value-estimate synthesis, and arguments (A-claims; Heavy scan on the book page). landisabigdeal.com
4. "Announcing the Center for Land Economics," Progress and Poverty Substack, 24 February 2025 — used for the Center's February 2025 founding with Greg Miller and its early work (A-claims). wiki summary
5. Doucet's collected writing at Game of Rent — used for biographical and project context (A/C-claims).