Content
The book consists of four essays. [1] Harrison contributed two essays, Prologue: Who's Afraid of Henry George? and The Georgist Paradigm, and one co-written with Kris Feder, Postscript on neo-classical economics: South Africa 1994: Countdown to Disaster. [1] [2]
In the introduction to A Philosophy for a Fair Society (1994) by Michael Hudson, G. J. Miller and Kris Feder, Harrison gave a summary:
The Georgist paradigm infuriated the aristocratic landlords. They strenuously schemed to suppress public understanding of its virtues. They initiated political action against the policy. In the United States, they even funded universities and professorships to degrade Henry George's thesis. [3]
James K. Galbraith, reviewing the second edition (2006), described the argument:
In The Corruption of Economics, Gaffney and fellow Georgist Fred Harrison begin their inquiry with the observation that America’s nineteenth-century universities, like its railroads, were land-grant institutions, vested with warrants to vast acreages under the 1862 Morrill Act. They were thus not only noble outposts of practical learning but also highly appealing vehicles for enterprising captains of land speculation. For these men, to found and run a university combined honor, influence, glory, and a not inconsiderable chance to become very rich. But the Georgist idea that land alone should be taxed – so as not to tax either profits or wages – threatened to create a dangerous political alliance between capital and labor against the landlord. The land-grant universities therefore hired and promoted a retinue of mediocrities willing to wage a war of derision and dismissal against George’s noxious creed. These were the founders of modern American economics, and Gaffney and Harrison document their words, commitments, careerism, and venality in rich detail, leaving no doubt about their true characters and beliefs. [4]
Gaffney's essay in the book, Neo-Classical Economics as a Stratagem against Henry George, gave as examples of Georgists who lost university positions Scott Nearing and Allen H. Eaton. [5]
Reception
A 1996 review by Murray Milgate calls Gaffney's essay "interesting, provocative, and witty". He states that "Gaffney does highlight the unfolding tension between the reforming ideals of British economists and the ideology of moderate British socialists (to whom George was so important at the time)". He doubts whether Gaffney makes the case that the Chicago school of economics was involved in trying to discredit George, as others were, and concludes that Alfred Marshall was correct in 1884 to judge that George's influence on economics would be transient. [1] A negative review by Herbert Gintis, in which he wrote that "It is not plausible that the neoclassical dog is wagged by the Georgian stump of a tail", had a reply in the form of an animadversion by Edward J. Dobson of the School of Cooperative Individualism. [6]
The book was called a "conspiratorial history" by Mark Skousen. [7] In reviewing The Corruption of Economics and A Philosophy for a Fair Society, with Land and Taxation (1995) by Nicolaus Tideman, all three works being published in the "Georgist Paradigm Series" by Harrison as director of the Centre for Incentive Taxation, Mark Blaug wrote:
There is no doubt that the emergence of the marginal productivity theory in the 1880s was stimulated by the need to find an answer to Henry George's indictment of the prevailing distribution of income, but that is not to say that the whole of the rise of neoclassical economics can be explained as a defence against Georgism[...] [8]
He finds that Gaffney's essay essentially argues in that way; and cites Critics of Henry George. A Century Appraisal of their Strictures on Progress and Poverty (1979) by Robert V. Andelson as a superior source for the debate. [8]
Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
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Henry George was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.
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Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that people should own the value that they produce themselves, while the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance that attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.
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Merrill Mason Gaffney was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' skepticism about Georgism with a dissertation titled "Land Speculation as an Obstacle to Ideal Allocation of Land." Gaffney was Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside from 1976 onwards. He died in July 2020 at the age of 96.
Heterodox economics is a broad, relative term referring to schools of economic thought which are not commonly perceived as belonging to mainstream economics. There is no absolute definition of what constitutes heterodox economic thought, as it is defined in constrast to the most prominent, influential or popular schools of thought in a given time and place.
Fred Emanuel Foldvary was a lecturer in economics at San Jose State University, California, and a research fellow at The Independent Institute. He previously taught at Santa Clara University and other colleges. He was also a commentator and senior editor for the online journal The Progress Report and an associate editor of the online journal Econ Journal Watch. He served on the board of directors for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
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In the history of economic thought, a school of economic thought is a group of economic thinkers who share or shared a mutual perspective on the way economies function. While economists do not always fit within particular schools, particularly in the modern era, classifying economists into schools of thought is common. Economic thought may be roughly divided into three phases: premodern, early modern and modern. Systematic economic theory has been developed primarily since the beginning of what is termed the modern era.
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Fred Harrison is a British author, economist, economic commentator, and corporate policy advisor, notable for his stances on land reform and belief that an overreliance on land, property, and mortgages weakens economic structures and makes companies vulnerable to economic collapse. Dirk Bezemer, a professor of economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, noted that Harrison was one of the earliest to have predicted the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In 2005 Harrison commented: "The next property market tipping point is due at end of 2007 or early 2008 ... The only way prices can be brought back to affordable levels is a slump or recession.”
Land value taxation has a long history in the United States dating back from Physiocrat influence on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. It is most famously associated with Henry George and his book Progress and Poverty (1879), which argued that because the supply of land is fixed and its location value is created by communities and public works, the economic rent of land is the most logical source of public revenue. and which had considerable impact on turn-of-the-century reform movements in America and elsewhere.
Land&Liberty is a quarterly magazine of popular political economics: its focus is the relationship between land and natural resource rights and 21st century economic policy. Published in the UK it covers international affairs and events from a global perspective.
Prosper Australia is a non-profit association incorporated in the State of Victoria, Australia dedicated to reforming taxes onto land as articulated by Adam Smith, the Physiocrats, John Stuart Mill, and most notably by Henry George in Progress and Poverty.
Harry Gunnison Brown was a Georgist economist teaching at Yale in the early 20th century. Paul Samuelson named Brown in a list of "American saints in economics" that included only 6 other economists born after 1860.
The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, founded in 1925, is a private operating foundation dedicated to the social and economic philosophy of Henry George through publication and research. Among its activities, the Foundation publishes The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, funds the Henry George Chair in Economics at St. John's University, and supports the Henry George Lecture Series at the University of Scranton.
On November 7, 1990, an open letter to then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev was published and signed by a rank of thirty Western sources, most of whom were academics. The contents of the letter made the argument to the Soviet head of state that while moving the economy away from a centrally planned system towards a free market mixed economy was a step forward, they warned the leader against following through with the West had done following the end of feudalism; privatising the land itself, instead opting towards a Georgist system of common ownership and the collection of public revenue through land-value taxation. Nobel prize-winners Franco Modigliani, James Tobin, Robert Solow and William Vickrey were among the letter's signees.
