The Problems: what geoists claim is wrong with the world

What this page is

Geoism makes two kinds of empirical claims: claims about what is wrong with the world (the diagnosis) and claims about what its policies deliver (see The Benefits). This page indexes the diagnosis. Every entry is a falsifiable claim with its own page, an honest evidence grade, and at least two independent anchor studies — an advocate should be able to cite any of these in an argument and not get burned.

Grades come from each page's evidence_strength assessment: Strong (replicated, big-name research), Moderate (solid but thinner), Emerging (recent literature, direction consistent), Contested (real disagreement — the page says so).

The claims

Where the wealth goes

• Most of the modern rise in the capital share is land, not capital — Strong. Independently replicated across US and European data: what looks like "capital eating labor's share" is largely land and housing.
• Corporate profits increasingly reflect economic rents — Moderate–strong for the profit rise itself; how much is rent versus efficiency is contested, and the page says so.
• The growth of modern banking is largely mortgage credit against land — Strong for the composition claim (long-run cross-country data); the further step that finance income is land rent is weaker and carried as attributed.
• Housing unaffordability is a land problem, not a construction-cost problem — Strong. Independent decompositions (140-year cross-country panel; US price-vs-production-cost micro data) converge on land; scoped to high-demand, supply-constrained markets.
• Rising land values and housing costs drive poverty — Moderate. Every component is separately well-evidenced (housing-cost-adjusted poverty, rent burdens, land's share of costs, place effects); George's causal chain as such has not been tested end-to-end, and the page says so.
• Homelessness is a housing-cost problem — Strong at the market level. Cross-sectional, panel, and time-series evidence converge on rents and vacancy rates as what explains where homelessness is worst; individual risk stays multi-causal, and the page keeps the who-vs-how-many distinction explicit.

What that costs us

• High land rents suppress productivity — Emerging. Theory plus recent macro studies; a young literature, graded accordingly.
• Public investment capitalizes into nearby land values — Strong. A large, consistent empirical literature: the public pays for the subway, the landowner pockets the value.
• The young are increasingly locked out of land wealth — Strong for the cohort trend (UK, US, and OECD data independently); the geoist reading of it as a land transfer is analytic, and the page says so.
• Rent-seeking drags economic growth — Moderate. The mechanism (talent and effort diverted from production to redistribution) is strongly theorized and historically documented; direct empirical magnitudes are contested, and the page says which numbers are safe to quote.
• Land underuse and speculative vacancy persist in high-demand cities — Moderate. Documented by three independent methods on three continents; magnitudes swing with the measurement proxy, and the speculation-vs-zoning causal split is unresolved.

The unclaimed fund

• Public goods can be funded from the land rent they create — Strong in theory (the Henry George Theorem is a formal result); empirically plausible.
• Land rent could fund a large share of government — Contested. Estimates vary widely with method and scope; the page walks through the range honestly rather than picking the biggest number.

Honest limits

Every entry here cleared the bar: at least two independent big-name anchors, claim-level verified, counter-evidence documented on the page. Where a component is proven but the composite causal chain is not (poverty), or a trend is measured but the geoist reading of it is analytic (the cohort divide), the grade and the one-line note say so — quote the graded claim, not the slogan.

See also

• The Benefits — what geoist policy measurably delivers
• Economic rent — the concept underneath every claim here
• Georgism and Geoism — the traditions making these claims