William Vickrey

Overview

William Vickrey (1914–1996) was a Canadian-American economist at Columbia, awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize (days before his death, shared with James Mirrlees) for work on incentives under asymmetric information — including the Vickrey auction.[1] A lifelong public-finance reformer, he was also among the most distinguished modern economists to identify openly with the Georgist tradition.

Views on Land

Vickrey argued that the conventional property tax is really two taxes — a good tax on land and a bad tax on buildings — and that the building portion should be reduced or eliminated in favour of taxing land (split-rate taxation). He considered the land tax close to an ideal revenue source: efficient, hard to evade, and fair. He contributed to the Henry George Theorem literature on financing city public goods from land rent, and championed marginal-cost pricing of urban services with land rents covering the fixed costs.[2] In 1990 he signed the open letter to Gorbachev urging the Soviet Union to retain land rent as public revenue.[3]

Broader Contributions

Vickrey pioneered congestion pricing — charging for scarce, commonly-owned road space on the same logic Georgists apply to land, a theory since borne out by large measured traffic reductions in Singapore (1975), London (2003) and Stockholm (2006). Posner and Weyl's Radical Markets treats his auction work as a direct ancestor of their COST proposal (Ch. 1).[4] His standing gave LVT strong respectability in mainstream public economics.

See Also

• Vickrey (1961): Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders — the founding auction-theory paper behind Vickrey's Nobel and the mechanism-design lineage Radical Markets builds on
• Congestion Pricing — his idea, and the evidence that it reduces traffic
• Spectrum Auctions — the auction-theory lineage applied to the airwaves commons
• Henry George Theorem · Arnott & Stiglitz (1979)
• Open Letter to Gorbachev (1990)
• Radical Markets (book)
• Richard Arnott — editor of Vickrey's collected public-economics papers
• Land Value Tax · Split-Rate Taxation · Joseph Stiglitz

Sources

1. "William Vickrey — Facts," NobelPrize.org. Nobel — used for the Nobel citation and biography (A-claims).
2. Richard Arnott (ed.), Public Economics: Selected Papers by William Vickrey (Cambridge UP, 1994) — used for the land-taxation and marginal-cost-pricing positions (A/C-claims). The "two taxes" formulation is confirmed from Vickrey's own words: the property tax is "a combination of one of the worst taxes — the part that is assessed on real estate improvements … and one of the best taxes — the tax on land or site value" (Vickrey, 1999; widely quoted, e.g. Lincoln Institute's LVT volume). Lincoln Institute LVT chapter
3. "Socialise the Rent: An Open Letter to Mikhail Gorbachev" (7 November 1990). Wikipedia · text — used for the signature (A-claim).
4. Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets (2018), Ch. 1 — used for the Vickrey-to-COST lineage (A-claim). Book page