A little over five years ago, I submitted a book review of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty to a contest run by the popular substack blog, Astral Codex Ten (abbreviated as ACX). To my surprise, I won first place, an event which completely hijacked my life and propelled me into the Land Value Tax movement.
After I wrote the original article, the general sentiment among ACX readers was enthusiastic, tempered with a measure of “cool theory bro, but does it work?” At the time, my honest answer was—“I don’t know!” I spent the next five months researching and responding to the three biggest objections critics had mustered in response to the first article. That was in December of 2021.
A lot has happened since, and readers of my book Land is a Big Deal as well as long time subscribers to Progress and Poverty substack have had a front seat to most of that. Nevertheless, there were many twists and turns along the way, most especially one devastating moment in my personal life where I very nearly walked away from the movement entirely, along with everything else I had done in my public career.
Today, Astral Codex Ten publishes my five-year retrospective, cataloguing the entire journey from start to finish. Making progress sometimes feel like a grinding journey, but putting everything we’ve done together in one place lends new perspective. I encourage you to read it in full:
I want to thank everyone who has contributed to our success, including and especially you readers.
Here’s to the next five years!
Lars,
You are doing remarkable work to advance the cause of getting economic rent into public hands. It is heartening to see the level of interest.
From the buyer side of rural land, the part that stands out is how little price discovery there is. Parcels sit for years at asking prices nobody tests, which is the holding-cost point in your book. Curious whether any of the LVT pilots tracked how fast vacant parcels turned over afterward.