A wiki encyclopedia of the Geoist solution to the world’s problems
A living reference on the economics of land, nature, and monopoly — free to read, and built so every claim can be traced to its source.
Early edition Entries are currently drafted by an LLM and cite-checked against their sources; human editorial review is coming soon.
Reading paths: Advocate's arsenal Policymaker's brief
Portals: Housing Cycles & crises Tax design Climate & commons History & people Case studies Objections answered The rent frontier
A cross-section worth your time
Hand-picked from across the whole library — standout entries from every corner of the argument.
Past selections →Platform and Data Rents
The returns a handful of digital firms earn from network-effect moats, accumulated data, and gatekeeping — the 'land-like positions' of the digital economy. The most contested rent in the file, alongside IP: is big-tech profit unearned rent, or the quasi-rent that rewards genuine innovation?
ResearchThe Mirrlees Review: Tax by Design
The UK's most authoritative modern tax review, chaired by Nobel laureate Sir James Mirrlees, concludes that land value should be taxed and proposes replacing business rates with a land value tax.
ResearchRethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
A 2017 New Economics Foundation / Zed Books study arguing land is the missing factor in modern economics, and that a land-credit feedback loop between mortgage lending and land prices drives housing unaffordability and financial instability.
PeopleElizabeth Magie
Georgist game designer (1866–1948) who patented The Landlord's Game (1904) to teach George's rent critique — the game that, stripped of its Georgist lesson, became Monopoly. The wiki's clearest story of the movement's ideas entering popular culture anonymously.
ResearchPlatform Competition in Two-Sided Markets
The foundational paper on two-sided platform pricing: platforms must get both sides on board, and the structure of prices across sides — not just the overall level — determines equilibrium. Context for platform and network rent analysis, not direct evidence for the corporate-rents outcome.
NarrativesNarrative: The Great Land Robbery
The justice narrative: existing land titles descend from enclosure, conquest, and dispossession, not production — so capturing land rent going forward is restitution without confiscation, advocates argue.
NarrativesNarrative: The Housing Crisis Is a Land Crisis
The practical case that housing is expensive because land is expensive — and that taxing land values, paired with permissive zoning, channels land into homes. The supply evidence, the honest limits (capture alone doesn't cheapen housing), and deployment guidance for urbanist audiences.
NarrativesNarrative: The Rentier Economy
The claim that a rising share of income rewards asset ownership and economic rent — above all land under housing, and by extension finance and digital platforms — rather than production.
Events & CampaignsEstablishment of the Alaska Permanent Fund
Alaska's 1976 constitutional creation of a fund from oil-resource rents — and its annual citizen dividend since 1982 — the largest real-world resource-rent dividend, though its formula has since become a recurring political battleground.
PlacesPittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh ran a split-rate property tax from 1913 to 2001 and sharply raised its land rate in 1979–80 — the setting for the most-cited US study of land taxation, and, in its 2001 repeal, its leading cautionary tale about assessment.
PeopleJoseph Stiglitz
Nobel laureate economist who coined and formalized the Henry George Theorem, has repeatedly argued that land and rent are the proper base for taxation, has spent 2022–2026 building a formal land-speculation-and-growth research program with Tomohiro Hirano that engages Henry George directly, and.
PlacesEstonia
Baltic nation that adopted a tax on land value with no tax on building improvements as part of its post-1991 reforms, making it one of the closest real-world implementations of Henry George’s proposal.
The four entries everything else refers back to
New to the wiki? These are the most-cited entries.
Land value tax
A levy on the unimproved value of land, excluding buildings and improvements.
Economic rent
Income to the owner of a fixed resource above what’s needed to bring it into use.
Henry George
The 19th-century reformer whose Progress and Poverty launched the movement.
Progress and Poverty
The 1879 book that asked why poverty deepens as progress advances.
Key concepts to know
The handful of ideas that the rest of the library is built on.
All concepts →Deadweight loss
The value a tax destroys by discouraging activity — near zero for a tax on land.
Unearned increment
The rise in land value created by the community around it, not by the owner.
Split-rate taxation
Taxing land more heavily than the buildings on it — the pragmatic first step.
Citizen’s dividend
Returning collected land rent to everyone as an equal, unconditional share.
Where it’s been tried
Land-value policy has a track record — from full national taxes to a century of local experiments.
All places →Pittsburgh
Taxed land at up to six times the rate on buildings for most of the 20th century.
Public leasehold
The state owns most land and captures its rising value through long leases.
Nationwide land tax
Levies a pure tax on land value across the whole country — buildings untaxed.
Grundskyld
A national land tax since 1926, and the centerpiece of the 1957 “ground-duty” government.
People in the movement
From the reformer who first made the case to the Nobel laureate who called a tax on land the perfect tax.
All people →Henry George
The reformer whose Progress and Poverty made land the center of the argument.
Elizabeth Magie
Invented The Landlord’s Game to teach George’s ideas — it became Monopoly.
Mason Gaffney
Economist who argued mainstream theory buried land to shield rentiers.
William Vickrey
Nobel-winning economist who called the tax on land value the “perfect tax.”