The Public Financiers:

Ricardo, George, Clark, Ramsey, Mirrlees, Vickrey, Wicksell, Musgrave, Buchanan, Tiebout, and Stiglitz, by Colin Read, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2016. Review by Bill Batt

Professor Read gives us an eminently readable book about the leading economists responsible for developing the sub-discipline of public finance. It is part of the author’s “Great Minds Series.” Continue reading

One Child

The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment, by Mei Fong, 2016, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Review by Lindy Davies

A committed Marxist will tell you that the historical failure of socialist societies proves nothing about Marxism per se, because real Marxism has never been implemented. But, exactly what “real Marxism” amounts to isn’t so easy to identify. There are many sects (for example, Wikipedia lists thirteen Trotskyist organizations in the United States). Continue reading

Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality

by Edward T. O’Donnell, Columbia University Press, 2015. Review by Ed Dodson

Henry George’s life and work have interested a small number of academic historians in each generation since George died in 1897. The latest of these, Professor Edward O’Donnell, succeeds in bringing to life the temper of the times during which Henry George rose from obscurity to become a champion of what he embraced as the true principles of republican democracy. Continue reading

Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World

by Martin Adams, 2015, North Atlantic Books. Review by Edward J. Dodson

Twenty years ago I made a decision that has been nearly all-absorbing of my time and energy. I started to compile the documented history of the people who came to embrace the principles embraced by Henry George. Today, despite a considerable number of books and published academic papers on the history of the movement established by Henry George and his generation of stalwart supporters, few people in any country one might name know the movement lives on. Continue reading

I Know! We’ll Give Out Free Money!

by Lindy Davies

Pity the poor Georgists; they mean so well; they have such admirably momentous ambitions, but they’ve put all their eggs in one nineteenth-century basket. There’s so much more going on today! So many sources of privilege and exploitation — so many like-minded activists with whom we could make common cause! Yet here we remain, stuck in the aqua terra of land. Now and again some prominent (or, even, potentially prominent; we’re pretty desperate) commentator comes along, pats us on the head, and offers a list of nostrums that that’ll get us out of the mud! Continue reading

Piketty’s Model of Inequality and Growth in Historical Context

by Polly Cleveland

In Thomas Piketty’s doomsday model, slowing of growth in the twenty-first century will cause an inexorable increase in inequality. Piketty is not the first to propose a grand model of inequality and growth. To get some perspective on his model, let’s take a brief look at what the “classical” economists had to say, and how the “neoclassical” economists responded. Continue reading