Until the mid-1880s, the American industrialist Tom L. Johnson had little interest in anything beyond his bottom line. At the age of fifteen, he had leveraged a family connection to the Du Pont dynasty to learn about the streetcar business. Soon, newspapers were describing Johnson as a “street railroad magnate”, after he bought controlling stakes in the transport infrastructure of Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Detroit. “He was just a money-making man of business”, a 1910 magazine profile reported, “and would probably have remained so but for a trivial incident.” The possibly aprocryphal incident involved a newsboy, who approached him on a train about buying a book by the economist and social reformer Henry George. Johnson declined, but the conductor overheard the exchange and urged him to read the text. And so he did, voraciously, and then proceeded to read Henry George’s magnum opus, Progress and Poverty (1879), which shattered his fiscally ruthless worldview. Johnson, unnerved, offered his lawyer a retainer of $5000 in late nineteenth-century money to fact-check the claims: “I must get out of the business, or prove that this book is wrong.” The story ends with Johnson in a New York hotel room with his lawyer, one of the Du Ponts, and the steelmaker Arthur Moxham. The men pour over the text and can't find a single error. “All four of us . . . were converted to an unnamed philosophy, by an unknown prophet, an obscure man of whom we had never before heard.” Soon after, Johnson met George, who inspired him to go into politics, campaigning on a platform of anti-monopoly reform.

Johnson was not alone in having his world shattered by Progress and Poverty. The author and activist Emma Lazarus claimed that anyone capable of understanding the arguments would never again be able to “dine or sleep or read or work in peace until the monstrous wrong in which we are all accomplices be done away with”. Alfred Russel Wallace believed George’s tome bested On the Origin of Species; Helen Keller found “a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature”; and Einstein thought one could not “imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice”. (And the boardgame Monopoly would not have existed without the dissemination of George’s ideas.) One of the most popular books of the late nineteenth century, Progress and Poverty sold several million copies, and its influence — in the US, but also in the UK, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand — has often been cited by historians as one of the main currents that ushered in the Progressive Era. By the philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey’s estimate, the book “had a wider distribution than almost all other books on political economy put together.”

Progress and Poverty asks a simple question, still relevant more than a century later: why does technological progress and the expansion of public services seem to fuel, rather than mitigate, poverty and social disparity? The answer comes down to the unearned profits of landowners. As the quality of life in a town or city increases, so too does the value of land — value which is created by public investment and collective activity, not mere individual effort. Landowners, however, capture this value by extracting higher rents as the price of their plots steadily rise, while wages often stagnate. George’s solution involved a fiscal tool known as the land value tax, which attempts to redistribute the value produced by land (including natural resources, control of the commons, etc.) from private interests into social welfare. “It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community”, writes George in Progress and Poverty. This economic ideology has a form of ecological conservation at its core. Since pollution degrades the commons, often in the name of private profit, it must be regulated, or, at least, taxed to allow the public to benefit (if only in the short term) from the costs borne by the environment. A radical feature (and vector for critique) of George’s system is his conviction that the land value tax could be set at a rate that would make all other forms of taxation obsolete.

Not everyone was convinced by George’s philosophy. Writing to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Marx declared Georgism a sham, a form of capitalist reform that didn’t confront the real source of inequality: ownership of the means of production. “All these ‘socialists’ [like George] have this much in common that they leave wage labour and therefore capitalist production in existence and try to bamboozle themselves or the world into believing that if ground rent were transformed into a state tax all the evils of capitalist production would disappear of themselves.” Leo Tolstoy, who eventually became George’s correspondent, saw no such issue: “This book is wonderful”, he wrote to an associate in 1885, “it is beyond value, for it destroys all the cobwebs of Spencer-Mill political economy — it is like the pounding of water and acutely summons people to a moral consciousness”. In the final year of his life, almost thirty years after first encountering Progress and Poverty, the Russian author continued to tout George’s philosophy: “The supposed rights in landed property are the foundation not only of economic misery, but also of political disorder, and, above all, of the moral deprivation of the people.”

Today, George’s concepts are still in circulation. Universal Basic Income finds a precursor in his idea of a “citizen’s dividend”, and in 2023, to combat the inequality produced after property speculators bought up cheap property following the 2008 recession, the mayor of Detroit suggested replacing standard property taxes with a land value tax. Despite the shortcomings of George’s doctrine that have emerged in the century since it first came on the scene — namely, its blindness to broader, systemic critiques of capitalism — his diagnosis of the uneven distribution of progress remains all too relevant today.

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. . . . It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between House of Have and House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.