Podcasts about Henry George

Nineteenth-century American economist Henry George blamed poverty and depressions on landlords. George argued that their rents were associated mainly with public investments and should be shared with the community. Show host Gene Tunny speaks with returning guest John August about Georgism—the economic philosophy of Henry George that advocates for a single tax on land value. They explore the ethical and economic arguments behind taxing land, its historical popularity, and how it is perceived today. The discussion covers economic rent, speculation, tax distortions, and housing policy, critically examining Georgism's assumptions and limitations. John is the Fusion Party candidate for Bennelong in the upcoming Australian federal election. Please let Gene know your thoughts on Trump's tariffs and any questions or comments regarding this episode by emailing Gene at contact@economicsexplored.com.TimestampsIntroduction (0:00)John August's Background and Campaign (4:19)Georgism and Its Influence (7:25)Economic Theory and Georgism (11:35)Critique of Georgism (16:19)Land Value Taxation and Economic Rent (23:15)Impact of Georgism on Economic Policy (31:54)Conclusion and Future Discussion (49:33)TakeawaysGeorgism, developed by Henry George in the 19th century, proposes a radical approach to taxation by advocating for a single tax on land values to address economic inequality and reduce speculation.While most economists reject Georgism, the theory continues to have passionate advocates who argue that land value taxation could create a more productive and just economic system.The Georgist perspective highlights how public infrastructure and community development can increase land values, creating unearned income for property owners without compensating the broader community.Modern Georgists have moved away from the original concept of a 100% land value tax, instead advocating for a significant increase in land value taxation as part of a broader tax reform strategy.The theory raises important questions about property speculation, economic rent, and the potential for less distortionary forms of taxation that could promote more equitable economic development.Links relevant to the conversationJohn's federal election campaign website: John August for Bennelonghttps://www.fusionparty.org.au/john_august_bennelongGrand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius - Nasar, Sylviahttps://www.amazon.com.au/Grand-Pursuit-Story-Economic-Genius/dp/0684872986Fixing Australia's Housing Crisis: Fusion's Plan w/ Owen Miller – EP277https://economicsexplored.com/2025/03/27/fixing-australias-housing-crisis-fusions-plan-w-owen-miller-ep277/Trent Saunders and Peter Tulip's RBA Discussion Paper “A Model of the Australian Housing Market”:https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2019/2019-01/Lumo Coffee promotion10% of Lumo Coffee's Seriously Healthy Organic Coffee.Website: https://www.lumocoffee.com/10EXPLOREDPromo code: 10EXPLORED Full transcripts are available a few days after the episode is first published at www.economicsexplored.com.

Dr. Martin Jacobson is a political philosopher who specializes in what he calls left-libertarian philosophy. Martin sees Georgism as a fusion of libertarian and progressive philosophy that translates to a version of libertarianism centered on land access as a solution to systemic inequalities. What really interested me about Martin's work on Henry George was his ability to advance progressive ends with libertarian means, while exploring the relationship between these two ideologies. His dissertation was titled Land & Liberty: On the Natural Monopoly of Violence. Being an American, I think most libertarians we come across are more like the anarcho-libertarians Dr. Jacobson talks about. But our discussion helped me understand why the libertarian perspective is so crucial to reforming the very institutions they criticize.Together, we compared the different types of libertarianism, where Henry George fits in on the libertarian and progressive spectrum, and if effective altruism is ever really possible. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/

TrineDay's The Journey Podcast 172Onward! Kris, Paul, Liz, Kent and Adam Wish Bruce WellPublisher Kris Millegan and authors Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould, S. K. Bain and A. W. Finnegan wish Bruce de Torres well as he becomes Communications Director for the American Small Business League. Bruce became TrineDay's Marketing Director in 2020 when Kris launched TrineDay's podcast, THE JOURNEY: Conversations with Publisher Kris Millegan.Bruce's book, GOD, SCHOOL, 9/11 AND JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free, came out in 2021 (Read the amazing reviews at BrucedeTorres.com!), the same year Kris launched TrineDay's Live monthly Zoom Roundtables, inspired by Paul and Liz's book, THE VALEDICTION, their two-part memoir about the mainstream media's refusal to broadcast the truths that Paul and Liz found in Afghanistan about the Soviet Union's presence there in the 1980s, and about what Paul and Liz call “the narrative creation process.”The Roundtables explore JFK's vision of peace, and economic justice as the foundation for a genuine world peace, highlighting the principles of Henry George, 19th Century American political economist. Future Roundtables can be found at Valediction.net, under Events. Past Roundtables can be seen on YouTube, on the channel called “Valediction Vision.”S. K. Bain is the author of four TrineDay books: THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK IN THE WORLD: 9/11 as Mass Ritual; THE END…IS ONLY THE BEGINNING: 2022 and the Coming of God; BLACK JACK: The Dawning of the New Great Age of Satan; and MOST DANGEROUS: A True Story. His humor lets the reader comprehend the malice evident in the events he relates.A. W. Finnegan is the author of THE SLEEPER AGENT: The Rise of Lyme Disease, Chronic Illness and the Great Imitator Antigens of Biological Warfare, “very different than what most people think of when they hear ‘biological warfare.' An attack to tire and exhaust; to take down your enemy over one hundred years, not six months or so with a deadly disease, because those burn out quickly and actually don't do as much damage. … if you take out the immune system, there's a secondary effect on the brain, causing what I call the dark triad: chronic disease, neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, and cancers. All three of those are absolutely exploding in western countries today.”Inspired by Paul and Liz's stories of synchronicities, dreams, and other mystical experiences, Bruce describes seeing JFK in his mind's eye while standing near the eternal flame at Arlington Cemetery, then having an echo or bookend experience while standing on the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza seven years later.“TrineDay will always be family. I will stay in touch. And, as Kris says, there is a right way to walk here on earth, a right way for us to treat our brothers and sisters.”

Today's discussion was recorded in October of 2024 and was held with Dr. Branko Milanovic. Dr. Milanovic is a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality and one of the leading scholars on income inequality in the world.  He worked as a lead economist at the World Bank's research department for 20 years, and as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has held numerous professorships at universities such as the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, London School of Economics, and the New School, where he currently teaches. He is the author of several influential books including The Haves and the Have—Nots, Capitalism Alone, and his newest book, Visions of Inequality. Dr. Milanovic earned his Ph.D. from the University of Belgrade.  Together, we discussed his newest book, a history of thought around inequality, and why he did not include Henry George in his book, even though he is such an important thinker on this subject.  To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

Today's discussion was recorded in November 2024 and is with Mr. Paul Forrester, the second-place winner of our 2024 Annual Writing Contest.  Mr. Forrester is a Ph.D candidate at Yale University's philosophy department where he researches ethics, political philosophy, and how institutions make economic cooperation more feasible. He has authored several papers including The Desire Machine, New Argument for Uniqueness about Evidential Support, Concurrent Awareness Desire Satisfactionism, and many others. Mr. Forrester earned his bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Political Science from Duke University and is currently working on his Ph.D at Yale.  Together, we discussed a dialogue between John Locke and Henry George, both of their theories of self-ownership, and why natural resources are necessary for all economic and human activity.  To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

In this episode, we're diving into a timeless economic solution that's gaining new attention in today's housing debates: the Land Value Tax (LVT). Unlike traditional property taxes, which tax both land and the structures on it, a Land Value Tax focuses solely on the land. This means property owners aren't penalized for making improvements, like building more housing—a crucial distinction in the context of today's housing crisis. We'll explore the origins of this idea, tracing back to economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the 1700s, and its popularization by Henry George in his influential 1879 book Progress and Poverty. Advocates of LVT, often called Georgists, have emerged from across the political spectrum, including notable figures like Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz. Joining us is Floyd Marinesco from Common Wealth Canada, a think tank advocating for a Land Value Tax to address housing challenges in Canada. Floyd shares insights into how this idea could reshape housing markets and what lessons might apply to other regions facing similar issues. Have questions or feedback? Email me at askjohn@movesmartly.com—we'd love to hear from you!

Triggered by the election of Donald Trump to a 2nd term, we explore the reasons why 49% of the country is sad and angry. We consider what religious, secular and ethical commentators such as Nancy Demoss Woldemuth, Anthony Davis, Frank Schaeffer and others have to say, and quote the words of 19th century economic historian Henry George from his book, on "How Modern Civilization May Decline". We remind ourselves what Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar: "the Most High rules in the kingdom of men." And we paint a picture in broad brush strokes of how the next four years will lead to major upheavals by 2028, leading on to a full collapse of American Democracy, Christian Orthodoxy, and Russian Oligarchy by 2043, the year when death itself can be expected to end and the long awaited peace and prosperity that the world has been awaiting since Eden will begin to unfold. It is a calm and encouraging, but sober look at the many things that will be happening to unravel our current existence, unveil the good thiings to come, and teach all of us lessons along the way.It is Near focuses on the alarming and the hopeful; the frightful and the forgotten; the blinding glare of giant problems, and the dark secrets that lurk even more menacingly in the shadows of global trends. "Amazing Grace" may have taught our hearts to fear, but for most Christians and non-Christians alike, divine grace as commonly conceptualized does not those fears relieve. It is Near will be informative, accessible, comforting, and challenging to every thinking person. It will call Christians to account and provide a breath of fresh air for secularists who, for once, would like to hear a conciliatory and intellectually honest message from a thoughtful Christian voice. Owen Kindig of Sitka, Alaska is your host, and is responsible for the content."Even the bad news is good news."

Arion, Rebecca and Olly unearth the origins of iconic board-game Monopoly, marketed across the United States by Parker Brothers on 5th November, 1935. Its roots lay in a game designed by Quaker feminist Lizzie Magie in 1902, intended to illustrate the theories of political economist Henry George. Her concept, called "The Landlord's Game," intended to demonstrate the unfairness of the land system. But, though home-made versions spread across the States, the game was only picked up for official distribution after being spotted by entrepreneur Charles Darrow in Atlantic City. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly reveal how little Magee was financially compensated, despite having a patent on the game; explain why the London version of the board has been played in more territories than the Atlantic City version; and consider the merits of spin-offs Gayopoly, Drinkopoly, and even the ‘Love Actually' version… Further Reading: • ‘Lizzie Magie invented Monopoly, so why haven't we heard of her?' (The Guardian, 2015): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/10/lizzie-magie-invented-monopoly-landlords-game • ‘The Game of Monopoly is Patented' (Library of Congress, 2010): https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/december/game-of-monopoly-patent#:~:text=Charles%20B.,Parker%20Brothers%20bought%20the%20game • ‘The surprising history behind the board game "Monopoly"' (CBS, 2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz5H0cg2uXs This episode first premiered in 2023, for members of

Today's discussion comes from our most recent annual conference “Existential Crises: Is the Georgist Paradigm Part of the Solution?” and was recorded in July of 2024. This is the final panel of our conference content on the polycrisis afflicting the globe. Thus far, we have discussed the four most important crises, followed by how Georgism can alleviate these crises, which was then be followed by how to make Georgism more politically palatable, and will now conclude with different Georgist policy solutions. Today's panelist is part of our fourth and final panel, “The Policy Options.” Our speaker for today's episode is Bryan Kavanagh. Mr. Kavanagh has extensive experience as a real estate evaluator working for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, as well as its Taxation Office. After many years in the public sector, Bryan went on to establish his own real estate evaluation firm Westlink Consulting. He is a research associate at the Land Values Research Group, a publisher of land-value-based economic research. Mr. Kavanagh is also an Executive Committee member of Prosper Australia, an international NGO committed to economic justice via land redistribution as proposed by Henry George. We were joined by Bryan to discuss how real estate prices impact the boom-bust cycle, why economic crises repeat themselves throughout history, and why economists are not so great at making predictions.  To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

Today's discussion comes from our most recent annual conference “Existential Crises: Is the Georgist Paradigm Part of the Solution?” and was recorded in July of 2024. For the next nine weeks, our discussions will revolve around the polycrisis afflicting the globe with four subtopics. The first will be the four most important crises, followed by how Georgism can alleviate these crises, which will then be followed by how to make Georgism more politically palatable, and will conclude by discussing different Georgist policy solutions. Today's panelist is Dr. Kris Feder. Dr. Feder is a recently retired professor at Bard College, where she taught courses on environmental, urban, and ecological economics. She has held numerous fellowships and taught at multiple universities such as West Chester University, Temple University, and Franklin and Marshall College. Dr. Feder has contributed to and coauthored three books: The Corruption of Economics, Beyond Neoclassical Economics: Heterodox Approaches to Economic Theory, and Critics of Henry George. She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. from Temple University.  Together, the Henry George School joined Dr. Feder to discuss modern monetary theory, the benefits of The Green New Deal, and how a land-value tax can be used to pay for its initiatives. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

Symposia is a longer-form podcast where we explore ideas from our previous seminars. Symposia will offer deeper dives on relevant issues to provide listeners with expansive insight. Whether you're an expert or just someone who wants to hear a different perspective, Symposia offers listeners a college-level lecture for everyone to learn from. We want all our listeners to find our discussion stimulating, and hope you walk away having learned something new.  Today's discussion comes from our most recent annual conference, “Existential Crises: Is the Georgist Paradigm Part of the Solution?”, and was recorded in July of 2024. For the next twelve weeks, our discussions will revolve around the polycrisis afflicting the globe with four subtopics. The first will be the four most important crises, followed by how Georgism can alleviate these crises, which will then be followed by how to make Georgism more politically palatable, and will conclude by discussing different Georgist policy solutions.  Our conference content will kick off with a keynote address from our long-time friend of the Henry George School, Mr. Fred Harrison. Mr. Harrison received his bachelor's from Oxford University and his master's from the University of London. He is a veteran journalist who has served in multiple news agencies such as The People and Wellington Journal. In 1988 he became the Research Director of the Land Research Trust, London, and has advised several corporations and international governments on tax and economic policy. Fred places an emphasis on the housing market and its interaction with the economy as a whole. He is the author of many books, including The Corruption of Economics, The Power in the Land, and A Philosophy for a Fair Society, all of which critique mainstream economic thinking. Together, we discussed how Henry George initiated a global reformist movement within politics and economics, how to reinvigorate the Georgist movement, and how this can reverse democratic backsliding around the world. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

There's a lot of takeaways from any conversation with Joe Minicozzi, or one of his many public presentations. Here's mine today: omnipotent forces didn't create our current systems, whether we are talking about zoning, traffic engineering or tax assessment. Or, in fact, just about anything in life.These were all created by fallible humans. We can, and should, change them. It's our duty, our responsibility. Your local tax system, and your local zoning code were not handed down to you by Moses from the mountain.Joe Minicozzi of Urban 3 is one of those rare people that just has a knack for communicating complex ideas. If you haven't seen one of his presentations, run out and do so. Here's a sample from Not Just Bikes, and one from Strong Towns. Today, we talk in audio form instead of video, but I suspect you'll enjoy it just the same. Since this is a blog, too, here's a few visual references for fun:Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin's Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you'd like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”Text Transcript:Kevin K (00:01.231) Welcome back to the Messy City podcast. You know, one of the joys that I've had in being involved with the New Urbanism Movement and the Congress for New Urbanism for many, many years is you get to meet and know people who take a lot of issues that we talk about and care about and completely reframe them and make them much more interesting and accessible and understandable, I think, to a larger audience. And there's been a number of people who who've done that or I've seen that happen in the course of my career. And one of those is joining me here today, live from Asheville, North Carolina, Joe Minicozzi. Joe, how's it going, Joe Minicozzi (00:42.018) Great, thanks for having Kevin K (00:43.771) Well, it's fun. I've been wanting to do this one for a little while and it's you're a busy guy and I'm really glad you made some time. Joe, you may know he's often had his work featured in Strong Towns. He's a regular on the speaking circuit with his firm, Urban 3, and he's really developed a unique approach to kind of explaining our built environment in graphic and financial terms I think has changed a lot of people's thinking about things. And we're going to get to some of that. Joe has, one of the cool things, Joe, is you're working all over the country. So there's always something new to talk about. But before we get there, I do think it's interesting for people to understand your background because like somebody coming upon you today and one of your presentations, they might think, he's like this kind of urban guru guy. What does that mean? Or he's like a financial guru guy, but you're actually, you're an architect. Correct? Not licensed, but educated. Yes. Where did... I don't think... One thing I never knew, Joe, like, where did you grow Joe Minicozzi (01:44.476) Well, not licensed. Can say that. Educated, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so... Go Joe Minicozzi (01:56.116) upstate New York, Rust Belt, little town called Rome, New York. Kevin K (01:57.445) Ruffio. cool, that's a cool town. Joe Minicozzi (02:05.282) Why do you say that? That it's not cool. When I was Kevin K (02:07.983) Well, I mean, there's some cool built fabric there. No? Joe Minicozzi (02:11.256) No. When I was a kid, they tore down most of downtown. It was literally one of the largest urban renewal projects per capita in the entire United States. And they blew up, I don't know, like eight to 10 blocks of downtown and built a wooden fort. There's a revolutionary wooden fort in what used to be our downtown. Google Rome, New York and go into the downtown, you'll see it. Kevin K (02:39.715) OK, I must be thinking of pictures I've seen of a different upstate New York downtown then or something. Joe Minicozzi (02:43.288) Oh no, no, it's, didn't, but I didn't realize that was abnormal because you you grew up in a town of 30 ,000 people, this is it, right? That's all you know. You just, so when you go to college, you're just like, yeah, surely like you've got a fort in your downtown, right? You know, everybody's got one. Actually Savannah has one. So, but it's not in the downtown. They didn't eliminate Savannah to rebuild a wooden fort. Yeah, but this is a magnet that I have that I in my bookcase over here. This is my grandfather. Kevin K (03:03.193) Right. That would have been rather odd. Joe Minicozzi (03:13.34) used to tie a rope to this thing. And he's an Italian carpenter, first generation American. And he's tied a rope to this and that rope was tied to my waist. And I used to just walk around job sites all day with him as a kid. I was like, you know, six years old walking around a job site with this huge magnet tied to my waist. And I was picking up nails and I would just sit there with this little anvil, like making the nails go straight so he could reuse them because you know, he's depression era. And I thought I was building buildings since I'd go home and talk to my dad and I was like, I'm building buildings with Papa. And he goes, sounds like you want to be an architect. And I was like, Bing, I want to be an architect. so that's, I wanted to be an architect since I was nine years old and I went to architecture school. Kevin K (03:53.903) You know, that's funny. That's like a weird thing we share in common. It's like, I don't know how that happened with me, because I actually didn't know anybody, you know, in architecture. And I knew a few people who built things, but for whatever reason, I just like always knew I wanted to go into architecture and city planning. it's it's just where I was. So, but anyway, so go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea. Like why showed up to like freshman year? Joe Minicozzi (04:12.386) Yeah, like, they really cool pencils, right? I mean, it's like little clicker pencils, awesome, great tools. Kevin K (04:22.199) And here's the list of all the s**t you have to buy. And I was like, what is, what does even all this stuff do? Joe Minicozzi (04:25.162) Yeah, here's, out and buy a thousand dollars worth of stuff. Yeah, little, remember that, God, I hate saying this, it sounds old. I was explaining to somebody on staff, remember those little letter writing tools, that little plastic thing that you'd have to put on your parallel bar to make those three lines to do your lettering properly? That was insane. Anyway, sorry, sorry kids. That doesn't exist anymore because we actually type in computers now. Kevin K (04:39.745) my god, yeah. Kevin K (04:44.805) Totally, Yeah. Kevin K (04:53.349) Yeah, I know. Everyone wants to share. mean, actually learning how to do architectural lettering was a pretty cool thing. I mean, I always liked the benefit of Joe Minicozzi (04:59.628) Well, the frustrating thing for me is you go all the way through architecture school and the University of Miami is a five -year program and you never built a building. So how can you be a designer of a building and not understand how it's constructed? So in my fifth year, we petitioned the school to build a homeless shelter and we just went ahead and built it, designed it, built it, worked with homeless folks to figure out what are their needs? How do we help solve the problem architecturally? And think that's one of the beauties of Miami is that, you know, the whole time I was, know, Miami is known for its new urbanism, but I was always talking with Liz Plater -Zyberg about what was going on in my hometown, because here you have a town that was designed for walkability, designed for the things that new urbanists would proclaim, yet it was dead as a doornail and we were eliminating our downtown. And Liz would always say to me, she's like, well, that's economics. That's something different. and we're trying to deal with this flood of what's happening in South Florida. That's a different reality. So this whole being seen as an economist is mostly about chasing a question of what are the policies that shape our environment and how do I visualize those for folks, which is very in line with new urbanism. We just look at the money Kevin K (06:15.397) So talk a little bit about how you got to this point then professionally of working on your own and doing a lot of the economic analysis work that you do Joe Minicozzi (06:24.984) Well, mean, if first is working in architecture, and I think this is probably true for most people that are urban designers, is that you want to look at the context of things that's more exciting for you, or why would somebody say, I'm hiring you, the architect, to do an office building here? If you have an urban design mind, you're like, an office building? Why not a mixed use building or why not a residential building? Why is that developer choosing? That's really the design is when the developer makes a choice, right? And so why is the developer choosing office over residential or over retail? In having an urban design mindset, you're going to be more empowered to be looking for those things, those other forces. What are the financial streams? So after architecture, I went to grad school and then started doing like internships in real estate development, real estate finance. I worked at John Hancock Real Estate Investment Group in Boston. kind top of the food chain, where they had $4 billion worth of real estate across the country. And you're seeing how they're making decisions financially about what's going on in your town, right? Because they're going to be doing an asset in your town, a strip mall or a mall or whatever, right? Totally different design series. It was fascinating to watch, but it felt, if you saw the movie, The Big Short, it felt a lot like that. It was like, wow, these people are like on a different way of thinking. Like there's questions they're just not even asking. We were spending $100 million a year fixing the buildings that we owned. Now when you're making 15 bucks an hour, like that's a lot of money, right? And so you'd sit there, trained as an architect, you'd sit there with these asset managers and I would literally show them pictures of buildings that we owned, a building that we owned in Topeka and a building that we owned in Tacoma. And there are two office buildings that we owned. And I would ask the finance officers, I'm like, what's the difference between these two buildings? And they would start going through all of this gibberish of numbers and cash flows, cap rates, NOI, all of that stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, look at the pictures. And like, what are you talking about? I'm like, it's the same damn building. We own the same building, the same office park building in Topeka and Tacoma. And you know, they fall apart differently based on the ecosystem. And this was like mind blowing to Joe Minicozzi (08:43.104) And it's just like, wow, they don't even understand what this... It's just a cashflow model for them. It's not a building, right? As an architect, you're going to... Like the windows fall apart differently. It's going to be based on the heat load of the air conditioner, all that stuff. But it's kind of mind blowing that this is the cashflow, the invisible sine curve that's moving by low cell high, that's moving through the system. And we're not even talking about it. So it's always... Yeah, go ahead. Well, it's always made me curious and got into real estate development. And then during the recession is when I started Urban 3, trying to help cities understand that they're prey to these sign curves. Kevin K (09:20.539) Yeah. I remember you used to tell a story about working at John Hancock and I think this is just instructive for people to understand the world of like big development, big finance was I think you had a story about we had they had X million dollars that they had to place within like 48 hours or something like that. What was Joe Minicozzi (09:37.56) Yeah. It was called a capital call where the CEO of the real estate arm came in and said, need to get, I think it was like $120 million into the ground in the next quarter. So that was an issuance that he was given from Topress. think of anybody that's on this podcast, if you have a 401k plan, if you're like CalPERS is the biggest one, the California teachers. pension. They have to make money on their money, right? So they take your retirement investment and they go out and make money so that you can have growth in your dollars as an investor. So if you want to see your 401k plan grow, well, somebody's got to make that money grow. So they're going around, in case of John Hancock, that's an insurance company. So somebody buys John Hancock life insurance. They want to return when they die on their money. what they do at the top level of John Hancock, they're putting some money into bonds, money into stocks, some money into real estate. So ours was the real estate arm. And whatever decision was made at the top, money came into the real estate world and was like, okay, that needs to get into the ground as fast as possible. So they were issued this $120 million in the next quarter. So the people that are finance managers call up all of their developer friends and were like, can I buy a building somewhere? That was basically how it happened. And the more expensive the building, the better because the more we can get that $120 million down to zero, the faster with less transactions. So imagine if you were the guy on the office that found a hundred million dollar building, like that's actually good, right? Now in architecture world, when we go to school, we're learning the direct opposite, like smaller, like little investments. We're not thinking about the big fish that are out there. anyway. Kevin K (11:25.583) Yeah. Sometimes it feels like you're like a language translator, Joe. It's like you have these two different worlds that you have grown to understand really well. One is like architecture and development, and the other is finance. And do you feel like you're kind of like straddling those worlds and trying to explain one to the Joe Minicozzi (11:44.652) Yeah, it's a simple sense, the tagline of our company is a data -driven storytelling, you know, that we have to communicate this stuff. And so lot of what we do is just unnerve things. I just came back from a meeting with our county assessor and their consultant, and, you know, he's going through this report that's got how many pages? I don't know, but it's all this. And it's like, how can you show me all of this text? and start talking to me about it. And I'm just like, I'm like, dude, you got to show me a picture somewhere. It's like, this is crazy. And so what we do is if you watch any of our work, we spent a ton of time breaking a city down to reveal its essence. So I don't need to get into like whether or not your spark plugs are firing at 20 beats per second or whatever. I need to just show you your car works, right? What does the audience want? They don't need to know the details. And far too many of us technically, trained folks, even architects, get down into the details and the audience doesn't necessarily understand does the car work, yes or no. So that's basically the method of our work is try to make it simple for folks. I use lot of analogies when I talk to people because that's how we relate. that's kind of, think of it having a curious mind, you want to go in and break something down, but to be able to speak it to a regular audience. It's not that the audience is stupid, it's just people just don't care about those kinds of details, they just want to know the bigger picture. Kevin K (13:19.545) Yeah, yeah. And so before we get into a couple of those stories, I am also curious, when you started your business in the recession, how did you, like who were your first clients and how did you get going in that world? Because it's definitely a different thing for an architect or urban designer to get into. Joe Minicozzi (13:39.448) You know, the funny thing was, I remember in the recession, I think I did a local lecture here in Asheville to the AIA, to the Architects Association. You know, it's a recession. Yeah, you're not building buildings. So as an architect, you're out of work, you know? But what's crazy about the architectural education, it's really an amazing education in creative thinking, but also critical thinking, right? So we're all given, you remember studio, there's like 15 of us in a studio, we're all given one problem to solve, but you're get 15 different answers, right? So that's the creative side. But the analytic side happens in all of that, that we're trying to break it down and figure it out before we can get to a design process. So that's the critical thinking side. Those skills can be applied anywhere. And then also in architecture, what do you do at the end of the semester? You have to pin up your work and you have to defend but it has to communicate to an audience visually, right? They need to understand what's going on in the design intent by what they see on the wall and how you present it. If you just look at that as a basic educational format, that can be applied anywhere. So we just applied architectural thinking to quantitative economic data for cities, right? So we get all of your data. We figure out what's its floor plan. Like why is this road here? Why is your city grown a certain way? That's all a floor plan, right? But there are decisions that are made along the way that fuel that growth. So if I add three bedrooms to my house, was it because I had four kids? know, it's like, that's the decision point for growing the house. Well, the same is true for cities. So we see when you get white flight, you're going to see that like in Kansas City. We saw that in Kansas City, Missouri, like this massive growth, southward, northward and westward or eastward, That's the whole, and that all happened really fast from 1950 forward. I think you, it's something like you doubled your population from 250 to 500, but you've 10 times your land area, which is crazy. Kevin K (15:52.475) Yeah, yeah, it's somewhere. We had a massive geographic expansion from the like 1947 city until today. I think the original 1947 city or so was probably in the ballpark of about 40 square miles. And now it's like 315 or so. Joe Minicozzi (16:15.242) I'm just drawing off the top of my head. There's an actual presentation out there somewhere, but I think it was like three times the road per person growth. So you're taking down three times the cost. So yeah, during the recession, was basically, I was showing up at conferences trying to help folks that were trying to have conversations about walkability, urban design, equity, and trying Kevin K (16:19.865) Yeah. yeah, absolutely. Joe Minicozzi (16:44.472) trying to share that the things that actually are all things that we advocate for also produce more wealth for communities. Does that make sense? So it was just like, look, we should just talk about that. Rather than say that it's good to have walkability, that can seem like a threat to an individual that you're trying to get me out of my car. That's very judgy. So rather than get involved in that emotionally, let's just talk about the fact that a Walmart actually destroys your wealth. Don't hate the player, hate the game, but you better understand the game. So when we did the models early on, it was just comparing Walmarts to Main Street, and Main Street was winning every single time. But why don't we build more Main Streets? Because the reverse is true, that we make it easier to do the Walmart, we tax it less, we charge it less, so that of course, Walmart's going to... You're going to see more Walmart -type buildings. I don't mean to be picking on Walmart so much. It's That's like a prototype, like the boxes. Those are throwaway architecture. So if you have property tax system that's based on your value of property, then there's an incentive for me to build junk in your community, right? The crappier the building I build, the lower the taxes I pay. Has nothing to do with the costs of the property. So the typical Walmart consumes two police officers per Walmart. So it actually costs you more in police services than a Walmart pays in property taxes. So if you were the owner of a Walmart, that's a good deal for you, right? So don't hate them. I hate us for not doing the math on that. It's that's shame on us. It's not hard. You just go call the police chief and say how many police officers are at Walmart every day and they'll tell you. That's data, Kevin K (18:28.015) Yeah. So let's talk about some of the recent data then. Not far from Walmart country, you've been working in Springfield, Missouri, which obviously is southwest Missouri, not far from Bentonville, Arkansas, which is the home base for Walmart. So we were talking, yeah, and Bentonville's actually an amazing, really cool town. And so you've been down in Springfield doing a bunch of work, and we were chatting about it. Joe Minicozzi (18:44.69) We've done Bentonville too, yeah. Kevin K (18:57.6) So this kind of took you in a little different direction. You started looking at trees and stormwater and everything else. I wonder if you could kind of talk through that scenario. Joe Minicozzi (19:05.888) Yeah. Springfield is really cool. it's one, it's nice about it. It's just straight smack dab in the middle of the country. It's Midwestern. There's not a lot of dynamic change to it because you don't have the coastal pressures of being next to an ocean or something like that. You don't have the rapid change of Silicon Valley where there's crazy changes in employment. It's very stable that And so in that stability, it's sort of a nice control subject of what's going on here. It's also not, it's not at the edge of some blast zone of some other city, you know? So think of like Rancho Cucamonga, California, which is outside the blast zone of Los Angeles. So whatever happens on Los Angeles is going to spread into the suburbs, suburb cities that are around it. So anyway, putting that aside. There's also this business person there, his name is Jack Stack, who wrote this game called The Great Game of Business, awesome book about business transparency. So the quote that I like of his is, I'm reading it right here, it says, a business should be run like an aquarium where everybody can see what's going on, what's going in, what's moving around, and what's coming out. So his theory of business is that everybody inside the company should know the balance sheet, they should know the P &L. that it's not him as the business owner, that he has a gold mine of money in the basement. You know, that everybody on staff should understand they've got to pay rent, they've got to pay insurance, all this stuff has costs. Well, our attitude is the same with cities. We should make the city economics so transparent that everybody understands the land use, the economic consequences of land use decisions. Don't tell me that people just want to live out in suburbia. Of course, if you're subsidizing them, why wouldn't you want to live in suburbia? So they hired us to do that modeling. Their city has run mostly off sales tax. think it's 86 % of their revenue comes from sales tax, 14 % comes from property tax, as far as geospatial, things we can put on a map. So that's kind of like the majority of their cashflow. When I did the presentation there, Joe Minicozzi (21:27.2) One of the things that we're doing the first side, showing the revenue and we're getting feedback from the staff and you're an urban designer, I'm an urban designer. One of the things that we tend to pay attention to how a city is shaped and what it looks like when we drive around. There weren't a lot of street trees in the city. And Graham Smith from Multi Studio based in Kansas City. He's the urban designer on the project. Graham said to me, goes, Kevin K (21:49.935) Yep. Joe Minicozzi (21:54.988) Do notice there's not a lot of street trees? And I was like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. It's like, it's like somehow like trees don't happen in the city. So I made a comment about it during the staff meeting and somebody in the engineering department said to me, well, I said, why don't you have trees? And he just said to me, goes, well, it's because trees attack the streets and sidewalks and use that word attack. I like my, my designer kicked in and I immediately responded. Do you not know how to design a tree pit? And then I stopped and I was like, well, that's not fair because I'm going to put them in the defensive. so, you know, this is somebody that's coming in with a mindset of maybe he came from, life safety or something, or the risk department inside city government. So he's only looking at it as a balance sheet item of one line item. Yes. A tree could screw up a sidewalk if you don't plant the proper tree species and don't build a tree pit. I got it. But it doesn't mean you should just lay waste to all trees. So just for fun. I came back to the office, I talked with Lea Hanringer, who was on the project. was like, and Lea's interested in understanding climate effects. So let's just look at the trees and what they could do financially for the city. So the whole stormwater system is, well, currently they're at a $9 million a year deficit in their stormwater system. They should be spending 15 million a year. They're only spending 6 million a year. So let that wash over you. They're not investing enough in their system that they've built. So that's only going to cause an economic collapse at some point in the future. If I don't brush my teeth every day, that's going to be a problem. One of them is going to fall out, right? So brushing my teeth every day is a maintenance issue. Same is true with any kind of infrastructure system. But to just go out and just totally replace the whole infrastructure system, if we just went out and built their stormwater system today, it'd be $600 million, $661 million worth of investment. So we considered the tree as a pipe and just said, what do trees do? And we actually made a cartoon of two sponges on a stick because there's a sponge in the air called leaves that suck water when the water hits it, keeps it from hitting the ground. And there's a root system that absorbs water from the ground. All of that keeps it out of the stormwater system. So a tree is essentially a pipe replacement, just to be crude about it, right? The average tree in Springfield, Missouri. And again, you don't have to be exact. Joe Minicozzi (24:23.192) Let's just get in the ballpark. It's like 770 gallons of water per tree gets sucked out of the air and 1500 gallons a year gets sucked out of the ground by the root system. So we can do the math on that and we kind of did an estimate based on the trees that they currently have in their city. Scaling that up, you're talking $600 ,000 of savings in the air and $1 .6 million savings in the ground. So that's $2 .2 million a year that you're not paying. in your stormwater system because of these trees. Here's an idea. Buy more trees. That sounds like a real rocket science idea. But I know, hey Joe, trees cost money, then we're gonna have to maintain them, we're have to make sure that we've got to get out and fix a sidewalk every once in while because we did something wrong. Okay, well we can do numbers on that. So we ran the math on it. The average benefit from the tree is a pipe, if you will. is about $115 a tree. The cost is 75 bucks. 'all take out your calculators at home, subtract $75 from 115. That means it's net positive 40 bucks a tree. we just, you know, just as a rough estimate, if you just go out and plant 10 ,000 trees, you're going to be net positive $400 ,000 a year. You can essentially use the tree to manufacture money to buy for police officers. That's cool. So don't just take it and look at that one side and just like, yeah, it's complicated to fix a sidewalk. What are the downstream effects of this? Now to kind of scale this up, remember I said $600 million system. Eugene, Oregon, we just happen to have the data. So Springfield's 170 ,000 people, Eugene, Oregon's 175, so it's got 5 ,000 more people in it. The stormwater system in Eugene, which actually has more rain in Eugene than in Missouri. Their stormwater system cost 400 million dollars versus Springfield is six hundred and and and 20 million dollars so so basically another way putting this Eugene, Oregon saved a hundred and eighty million dollars in their stormwater system and It comes down to the fact that they're a lot smaller. They the city shape is more compact So by doing compact design, you can actually save a hundred and eighty million Joe Minicozzi (26:46.903) Does that make sense? It's 35 square miles for Eugene. It's 83 square miles for Springfield. Kevin K (26:52.327) And to put it in context, I would imagine Eugene is still largely a city of like single -family homes. It's just maybe exactly, it's just a different layout for the city itself and how everything is configured on the ground. Joe Minicozzi (26:59.862) Yeah, yeah, it's not European. Joe Minicozzi (27:09.592) Well, our attitude is like, look, these are your choices. I live here in Asheville. So if you want to stretch out, fine. If you're a Midwestern city and you're like, hey Joe, this is the Midwest, you don't understand, we got lots of land here, we're gonna stretch out. It's like, oh cool, yeah, do it. But just make sure that you understand the cost of that stretching out and make sure that you let your decision makers know that people want to have a one acre yard, awesome, but it's gonna cost us $180 million more in a stormwater Is that the best choice for that public investment, that $180 million? Or could you have, I don't know, sent every child on a walkabout sabbatical around the world with that investment? There's lots of choices you could do with $180 million. Let's just be honest about Kevin K (27:58.117) Yeah, no doubt. Not to mention like one of the least of which could just be like lower taxes if that's your thing, you know. Joe Minicozzi (28:06.232) Well, or you could have invested that $180 million in more trees and you would have had $50 million of new revenue in your system on an annual basis, which is more than the ARPA funding that you got. ARPA was just a one year deal. Like you could actually manufacture more money than the federal government gave you. I mean, come on now, let's just talk about Kevin K (28:18.307) Right. Kevin K (28:24.123) Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is you're not even really getting into what some people might think of as like the frou frou design benefits of trees versus not trees in this. And so makes it a more pleasant place to walk or Joe Minicozzi (28:37.174) yeah. Aesthetic quality that reduces the heat island effect, reduces your air conditioning bills because you're not dealing with the outward effect of radiation. mean, there's lots of things. CO2, I mean, we didn't get an A that. We're just like a tree as a pipe replacement. Just start there. But yeah, if you did do those numbers, if you read, I don't know if you see on the bookcase up here, Happy City. and they get in the quantitative sociological effects that are actually financial as well because Canadians measure that stuff. We don't in America because we don't pay for health systems at the government level. So when the government actually does pay for the health system, they kind of want to know what the costs are. know, Charles Montgomery used all of that math in there to explain the financial consequences. I think the book is sort of a mislabeled. I think it's more of an economic than with the name Canotes. Kevin K (29:35.739) So at the stage you are now with Springfield, have you presented all this information to them and had that out in the world? Joe Minicozzi (29:45.356) Yeah. Well, one of the biases was that they wanted to continue to annex more land. And the first question I asked, which was why? And they said, well, people live out there and there's some higher wealth houses that are out there. Therefore, we're going to get higher taxes. And the reality of it is, and this is back to the original analysis that we did, which is the value per acre analysis. One of the biases people have with math is when they see like the Walmart's worth $20 million, they get really excited about it, especially compared to a building that we rehabbed on Main Street here in Asheville that's $11 million. So Walmart's twice the value, right? But that Walmart took 34 acres of our city versus our building on 0 .5 acres. And it's just a habit that humans have where they just immediately go to the big number without understanding the efficiency. Well, the same is true with suburbia. It's like, okay, yeah, they're experiencing wealth flight out of Springfield where people are just outside the city limits out in the county in their high -end neighborhoods. But when we do our tax model, you can see that they're actually not that productive. That's the first thing. Back to how I said, Springfield gets its money. They get their money off sales taxes. So why would you want to chase residential? Makes no sense. So we're gonna go and bring them into the city limits and then we're have to provide more services for them and not get any taxes out of them because we get all of our taxes out of sales. I actually told the audience when that question came up, I said, look, right now they're living outside, driving into your city and shopping, you're collecting their sales tax dollars and they're going home. You don't have to pay for their schools, you don't have to police them, you don't have to put the fire services for them, that's their problem. Why would you wanna take them in? and have more costs in your community when you're already getting the money that you need, which is the sales taxes. And as a planner, I hate saying that because it's like, everybody should be part of the community if you're involved at an economic level, but from a brass tax of how their financial system operates, there's no incentive for them to annex that land. But again, when you have the politics of everybody just there, and this is something just true to the new, as long as you've been in new urbanism and I've been involved, it's like this kind of habit. Joe Minicozzi (32:10.06) that we are America, so we must suburbanize. It's just this, it's ingrained in us. And it's really, it's a myth more than anything else. Kevin K (32:17.014) Right. So it also kind of strikes me, one of the interesting things about your work or that you get to see is the very different ways that local governments are funded all over the country. So you've talked about this example in Missouri, and it's probably really similar to how my city is. If I broke down our property tax bill, I think about 70 % of it goes to the school district. And then it's kind of apportioned up between the county and the city and some other, like the library board and a mental health. Board etc, but the lion's share is a school district and most of our city revenue is sales tax and then income tax because we Yeah, which is rare, but we have an income tax But I'm curious like what you've seen like around the country. Are there approaches that seem better worse more sustainable less sustainable or they just like they're Joe Minicozzi (32:54.4) Yeah, which is very rare. Yeah, that's Joe Minicozzi (33:08.916) They're all different. One of the jokes that I used to make is when we did this, I want to reference my former boss, Pat Whalen, in public interest projects. Pat's amazing. He's a genius. Pat had this incredible PowerPoint called the Economic and Environmental Case for Urbanism. And so he's the director of a real estate company trying to explain the value of downtown revitalization to people. That's where the value per acre analysis comes from. It was part of his show. what was interesting is it made sense in Asheville, and I just started poking around other cities in North Carolina because I was on the Downtown Association Board, and we're trying to figure out the value of our downtown versus other downtowns. you have a day job working for a district, the real Kevin Klinkenberg, you have this day job for this boundary. Well, don't you want to know how you operate versus the downtown improvement district or the Westport improvement district? Yeah, of course you do. So I was doing that for 10 cities bigger than Asheville and 10 cities smaller than Asheville. What's our taxable, non -taxable ratio? Who's got too much non -taxable? I don't know. Like until you get the data. So I made this shared website that's a Google document. And I shared it with the downtown directors for all the 10 cities and we populated it so we could all get metrics to understand how we stack up. What was your original question? Kevin K (34:43.963) It's just about the different mechanisms for a big local Joe Minicozzi (34:46.75) yeah. So, in that, we started to see that the downtowns were crushing it versus every other part of the city. Right? So, as an urban designer, we advocate for walkability, downtowns, everybody likes them, why don't we do more? And we start to find all the zoning rules that don't allow it, all the policies that don't allow it, and all the biases. And a whole Congress for urbanism is essentially discussing these things, going, who the hell put these things in place? You know, it's just, that's what we do. And we try to undo. these kind of rules that kind of get in the way. So I was doing, I think I was talking to Peter Katz and he's like, does it work this way in Florida? And I was like, I don't know. And so he hired us to do the analysis in Sarasota and sure enough, it was the same damn thing. So here's the way I see it. Florida has totally different rules than North Carolina. North Carolina has different policies than South Carolina, which is way different from Missouri. Everybody's got different state tax policy rules. But you know, and I know, when you drive around suburban Phoenix or suburban Los Angeles or suburban Boston, you see the same crap. To the radio audience, that's an architectural terminology, but it's like you see the same junk everywhere, right? And I told Peter, said, you know, it's hilarious to me. We all have different math, but it yields the same results. So in North Carolina, it's two plus two equals In South Carolina, it's three plus one equals four. In Florida, it's one plus three equals four. In California, it's 22 times 16 divided by the square root of 47 equals four. You know, it's like, we can make it complex, but at end of the day, that's all we have to do is use our eyes and go around suburbia and say, why is this happening? And you're going to see the same exact economic results in the landscape that's baked into the policy to reward it happening. So sort of shame on us for, you know, I don't have a math degree. I'm trained as an artist like you. I draw pictures, but I'm gonna go look at those policies and read them. Sometimes it gives you an aneurysm when you read some of these policies. But I think that's the beauty of the world that you and I operate in, is we're not afraid of that stuff. We'll get involved in transportation policies. Let's go read the ITE manual. It's like, of nerd does that, but we do it. Kevin K (37:07.611) I mean, if you talk to me when I was 19 years old in architecture school and said, well, hey, you're going to learn all about the intricacies of zoning codes and traffic engineering and also like, what? What are you talking about? But if you really want to understand your world and make a difference in it, you've got to dive into those things. So yeah, exactly. And actually, it is kind of fun and interesting to learn that it was fascinating to me when I first learned. Joe Minicozzi (37:25.826) and not fear Kevin K (37:35.003) much more about traffic engineering, like how engineers actually thought and what they were looking at and how they were evaluating streets and intersections and everything else to come up with their solutions. Joe Minicozzi (37:47.544) Well, you can be a better practicing professional too if you're respecting their profession and saying, I want to learn how you operate. Now I'm going to call BS on things when I see it, but at the same time, I'm going to respect that you have knowledge that I don't and I want to learn. But the thing that makes, I think that makes you and I different is that we also know that Moses didn't deliver their rules. That these are not infallible people that have designed this stuff. Kevin K (38:12.184) Right. Joe Minicozzi (38:16.056) that these are humans that are operating with their best intention, but often they make mistakes. Kevin K (38:22.331) No doubt, no doubt. I think we don't emphasize that enough that really so much of what we struggle against is just people trying to create systems and rules and then working with it and all of that can be changed. Joe Minicozzi (38:37.112) Yeah. Well, I just, this morning I sat with my county assessor and this is trouble that we started back in 2021. And here we are three years later and we're going through a reassessment in January of this year. And he's telling me that like a lot of the things that we recommended back in 2022, they're going to do, but they're not going to do it until 2029. I just about lost my mind. I was like, you know how many human beings my wife and I could produce in four years and you can't change policy? Come on now. That's bias in the system where it's like, there's nothing to stop them. It's just they've never done things this fast before. it was kind of frustrating and I told them, said, look, you just need to see me as a taxpayer now and not a consultant. I live here. My staff suffers. Kevin K (39:12.377) Yeah. Joe Minicozzi (39:32.438) with housing, everybody I know suffers with housing in this community because we're a hot market right now. And it's not fair that because you're going to be uncomfortable changing the way that you behave, there's no law that says you can't do this. This is just about your practice. And we see this, you've seen this with your career with city planners. It's like, well, we just haven't done it that way before. It's like, well, change. Kevin K (39:55.749) Yeah, yeah, it's not hard. It's not the end of the world, you know. Joe Minicozzi (39:57.622) The world's not going to stop. And guess what? Guess what? You're going to make a mistake again. Yeah, it's going to happen. It's like we're humans. Kevin K (40:05.423) I know. There's a real struggle a lot of times to just get people to take a risk to try something and try and fail and if you fail, it's not the end of the world. So what has Joe Minicozzi (40:16.376) They won't assess Airbnb's as commercial product. I'm like, dude, we've got 4 ,000 of them in my city. I've got people from Florida, cash flowing houses up here, and they're paying them off in four years. And my staff can't do that. I can't do that. Like, what the hell? And so why are you choosing to value them as houses and not commercial product? And the state, the state charges an occupancy tax on top of them, right? So the state knows that they're hotel rooms. Kevin K (40:19.532) yeah. Joe Minicozzi (40:45.368) because they're paying an occupancy tax, much like a hotel room would. So why are you choosing to value it differently and not value it on its cap rate? And I'm serious. Like I know that I'm kind of like beating this drum about here in Asheville. Nationwide, this is a problem. And the assessors are like, well, you know, it takes a while to kind of work this out. I'm like, no, Airbnb has been around since 2015. For f**k's sake. Sorry. It's like, this is, it shouldn't take 10 years. Kevin K (40:59.547) Yeah, no Joe Minicozzi (41:14.626) to realize how it affected the marketplace. You just sound stupid at that point. we don't understand. Kevin K (41:19.289) Yeah, it was crazy. It was such a big issue, as you might imagine, in Savannah, which I think for a time, Savannah was like the number one city in the world for Airbnb. Joe Minicozzi (41:29.516) Well, at least in Georgia, you have a separation between an occupant and a non -occupant. We don't have that in North Carolina. We're all treated the same, which is insane. So in Georgia, if you own a house in Savannah, but you live in Kansas City, you're taxed at a higher rate than somebody that lives in a Savannah house. Owner -occupied is totally different than non -owner -occupied. In North Carolina, we don't even have that protection. So it's even worse for us. So it's maddening. So anyway, anybody that's on this podcast that lives in a tourist town, like this is one of the things that should be the top of your agenda to talk about. It's like, I'm not saying don't do it. You we're a tourist town. Our baseball team is called the Asheville Tourists. Got it. Been the Asheville Tourists since the 1920s. This is our economy. But don't tax them less. That's crazy. Yeah. Kevin K (42:00.068) Interesting. Kevin K (42:24.443) Understand what they are, tax them, or have some policy that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. So one of the other things that you've been able to do with your work then is kind of related to all this. You get the chance to like dive deep into the history of especially like property taxation and other things. And I know you've read a lot of stuff in this world. How has Joe Minicozzi (42:28.746) It's a commodity, right? What does that do to housing prices? Kevin K (42:51.269) kind of impacted the work that you're doing or you're thinking, or what are some notable things that you've seen and just looking back a long time ago when a lot of these rules were being formulated. Joe Minicozzi (43:01.75) Yeah, there's some. One of the things about new urbanists, it's kind of weird. I hate that term because we're sort of just urban thinkers. We're complex thinkers. Joe Minicozzi (43:19.68) It's not new. This is just, we're operating in an urban environment, we're going to be interrogating things, but we tend to lean toward, if it's broke, fix it. That's our attitude. And it shouldn't take forever. But we also swim upstream to try to figure out who put this fence in. So who put the fence out in that field? And why is that fence there? And if the fence serves a purpose, keep the fence. If the fence was there for just because some random situation, get rid of it. It's like unnecessary policy. So you'll hear within our cluster of crazy friends, a lot of us are just like, rid of parking standards. Why do you need them? Why do we have trip counts for highways? Because when you look at the base data of trip counts, it doesn't make sense. Plus, since pandemic, we've changed the way that our commute patterns operate. So we should be changing our math. And like we operate faster with a level of, with trying to stop the bleeding, if you will. We're triage people, you know, we're like the emergency room medics. But we're also going to go upstream to figure out how did this start? So just for, you know, I started to see a lot of patterns in the assessment maps of how neighborhoods were construed or different market areas that lined up with redlining. And so redlining started in 1934 and went to 1968 and was deemed unconstitutional. But if you go to Mapping Inequality website, you actually find that there's maps that predate redlining that the bankers were using that was essentially racist. That if you were an immigrant or in a black neighborhood, they deemed you high risk and they changed your ability to get cashflow. Redlining was adopted at a federal level. So it's federal policy that said this is the rule of the land now, which makes it pernicious. It was already pernicious before, but for the federal government to come in and say, we're going to be unconstitutional here is pretty bad. But to everybody's credit, everybody's hands got slapped in 1968, that changed. Well, here we are today and we're still seeing the same effects in the valuation that models very similarly to redlining. So I was just like, well, maybe there's got to be a book somewhere that this is all talked about in the Joe Minicozzi (45:41.816) I found this book from 1922. It's the ninth edition. So was actually the first edition was 1895. So think about this, a book was reprinted nine times because it was so popular. It's called The Essays and Taxation by Edwin Seligman. And I love this quote. So just for the radio audience, just turn on your mind to 1895. This is what he wrote. Practically, the general property tax is actually administered as beyond all doubt, one of the worst tax systems known to the civilized world. Because of its attempt to tax intangible as well as tangible things, it sins against the cardinal rules of uniformity, of equality, and of universality and taxation. It puts a premium on dishonesty and debauches the public's conscience. It reduces deception to a system and makes a science of navery. It presses hardest on those least able to pay and imposes double taxation on one man and grants entire immunity on the next. In short, the general property tax system is so flagrantly inequitable that its retention can only be explained through ignorance and inertia. It is the cause of such crying injustice that its alteration or its abolishment must become the battle cry of every statesman and reformer." So this is somebody who works in taxation and goes, this is a crock of junk. Let's get rid of this. And that was over a hundred years ago, right? And so now I sat in a two hour meeting. with my assessors and their consultant going through is excruciating detail, all of this crazy mathematics. I'm like, why are we doing it this way? I understand what you're doing, but let's take a big step up. Why do we finance cities this way? Why is it based on value? know, Kevin, you and I are trained as architects, right? We want to do beautiful buildings. We want to do, if I could afford it, I would build a stone house, you know, because I like stone and it lasts forever. So I create an asset that will be in the community for hundreds and hundreds of years paying taxes. Why would you penalize me for that? You should be charging me on how often I drive on that road and how many times I use a fire call. Charge me for the services you provide rather than some arbitrary, hey, you built a stone house, therefore you pay more taxes. You could be right next door to me in a tin shack and have actually more income than me. Joe Minicozzi (48:09.944) and be taxed less because you have a tin shack and I've got a stone house. I could be making $50 ,000 a year and you're making $200 How is that fair? This is where I said that the income tax is a little bit more fair, but the thing is if you're really rich, you're not making income. You've got assets, right? Those are all hidden somewhere, not being taxed. So there's no perfect systems. That's why we advocate, and you see in our models, those red -black models where you have Black is producing wealth, net positive, red is net subsidy. And we did that for Springfield. 80 % of the city is subsidized. So just show that to the citizens and just be like, this is how we're subsidizing it. Is this the best choice? But you should charge me for it. If there's, yeah, go ahead. No, Kevin K (48:52.091) So when you do this, go ahead. I was going say when you do that kind of historic research, it, I mean have to ask the Georgist question, does that, how do you think about that relative to the Henry George critique, the land value tax approach versus the standard property tax that we do in most places? Joe Minicozzi (49:11.16) I mean, I think that aligns with Henry George, the statement. It aligns with how I feel as a taxpayer and also as somebody that practices in this world. The more we get into this with the Cessars, I have all the respect in the world for what they do because we do all of our work on their data. So I'm very thankful for them as a profession. But I also see that they're trapped. in a construction of their own making, the same way that traffic engineers are. And for anybody that's on this podcast that's read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Chuck Marrone, I mean, he nails it. That same ethos in that book is the same ethos I see with the zoning people that are all just about zoning. This is the way the zoning is, as if some omnipotent force gave them the zoning, you know? And then there's the same as I see this with the assessors, where I always ask them, I'm like, why is that the standard? Where did this come Like today when this one assessor was telling me that legally they can't assess Airbnbs as commercial. So I immediately asked her, I'm like, can you show me the law that says that? And she just went blank. And I was like, you just told me that there was a law that this, so tell me the law. And they don't, this is their bias. This is their practice. This is their fear. They're afraid to stir up the people that are out there with Airbnbs. I'm like, that's not what the law says. So you're making a choice not to do that. There's so much... Joe Minicozzi (50:43.129) discretion that people don't talk about. You see this when you talk to old school planners that are just like, the trip counts and the parking requirement, their bias kind of comes in. They won't call it a bias. Kevin K (50:56.197) Yeah, yeah. And I think we've often talked about that. And I think Jeff Speck famously wrote about that. You can manipulate a traffic study to say whatever you want it to say. And it's really just about the choices that you're making of what you want to do or what you want the outcome to be. Joe Minicozzi (51:14.12) We did a land analysis. Back to Henry George, we did a land value analysis where we just turn off all the buildings and just look at the land value per acre. This was in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The larger parcels in the commercial strip area were half the value of the out parcels across the street. I asked, I'm like, does land magically lose half its value when you cross the street? Same zoning category. And the tax assessor told me with all confidence, she goes, well, the cheaper one is bigger. The more land you have, the lower the value. And it's like, what economic rule is that true? And she goes, there's less people that can afford large tracts of land. So therefore we have to give a discount because there's less people in the marketplace. And I was like, well, that's kind of true. But does that work this way with other limited commodities like diamonds? If I get a bigger diamond, is it cheaper? Surely there's less people that can afford a bigger And everybody in the room was laughing, but she was just totally confused by that. And the weird thing is that I don't have an economics degree. I've actually never taken an economics course. So I just asked a question because I'm curious about this stuff. Kevin K (52:23.323) Yeah. So Joe, you've also been working a little bit in Annapolis, Maryland, which is obviously a really, really different context than Springfield, Missouri, one of the oldest cities in the country. wonder if you want to talk a little bit about what you've been doing there and what you're seeing. Joe Minicozzi (52:40.376) Yeah, Annapolis is cool. We did one of those red -black models for them. And one of the things that we noticed was their annexation pattern was an interesting tell. It's kind of funny. like, I've got a picture for that, but it's kind of hard to talk about a picture in this space. I'll Kevin K (53:03.387) Well, eventually, eventually this will be a YouTube thing too at some point. So we could do Joe Minicozzi (53:08.696) Yeah. from one of the things you could see in the, again, we talked about at the start of this about Kansas City, there's tells in the annexation pattern that tell you the problems that you're having today. So it's kind of like, you and I are the same age. I'm 56. There's things that I'm dealing with today in my body that didn't happen because of what I did last week. It happened because of stuff I did when I was in high school, right? The older you get, like all of a sudden it's like, my ACL gave out. Why is that? It was because I played football in high school. So it's like, just took a while for that ligament to just finally give. I can remember the concussion that I had when that happened. You know, it's like things like that. So we look at cities the same way as what did you do in your past that you're now seeing the problems today? So. One of the rules that we all know is roads only last about 50 years. so every 50 years is when you have your heart attack based on what you did when you first built those roads. Annapolis did 71 % of its land acquisition. So if you look at it today and just say, if we make a pie chart of this, when did these areas break down? Their first hundred years is 4 % of their land. for their first 100 years. From 1920 to 1800, that's 80 years, they did 5 % growth, okay? So that was 120 years. In just the year of 1951, they annexed 71 % of their land. So let that wash over you. Just imagine the pie in your mind of 4%, 5%, and then 71 % in one year. So those developments didn't all happen in 1971. would take a while from the late 50s, early 60s when you start to fill in all of those subdivisions, you're filling in a lot of lane miles in 71 % of your city. So those roads are now being replaced now in the 2020s, 2030s. And they're looking at, let's see, kind of try to do the quick math here. They're looking Joe Minicozzi (55:34.264) close to. two thirds of their roads are coming due because of that original sin of that annexation. But the habit in the 1950s, I think about that. People come back from the war, we're like, we're going to be modern. There's all these policies in place to reward this, the federal highway system, the FHA loans. And it's not that people had ill intent, they just were naive. They're just like, well, let's try something different. Let's kind of remake cities. And this is what we're dealing with. It's like we have to kind of think back to when that happened. So we show them the And you can see their jaws drop when I was showing this to them. And it's kind of like walking in and I'm the doctor, we just got a bunch of CAT scans and I show you your broken shoulder. I'm like, is the reason why you can't pick things up. You've got your shoulders broken. And everybody can see it because you can see it on the map. 71 % is a lot of area in one year. Kevin K (56:27.023) Yeah. What is some of the examples of how some of your clients have reacted to information when you're finally at the end? I would imagine it runs the gamut from complete denial to people excited to make some change. mean, what do you see on the back end of doing these analysis? Joe Minicozzi (56:49.196) You know, the mayor actually called me yesterday. I was bicycling into work and I get this telephone call from Annapolis and it's him and he's so excited. And he goes, it's it's hard. It's indescribable. We're all singing from the same sheet of music now. And so, you know, in respect for politicians, and I don't, I don't mean this in a, in a, as, negative as this is going to sound, but think about, let's, let's just kind of make it blunt. You win a popularity contest and you become mayor. That's it. That's the American system of government right there. They don't have the master's degree in urban design. They don't have the research of 30 years of public policy analysis and parking requirements. They don't have that junk shoved in their heads the way that you and I do. So they just win this popularity contest and they're trying to figure things out. their commerce is what they hear from people, the emotions, the conversations, how people react to their day -to -day living. It's sort of on us as professionals to help demystify that. So that's basically, that's the MO of our company is we're going to try to find a way to give you a lot of quantitative data, but we're going to do it in a way that's easy to understand and give you a pie chart. You know, it's like, we're not going to make that hard. You know, it's just, it is. This is what's going on. Here's that pie chart showing you 71%. is in that one year, they've had that data since 1951. It's like, it shouldn't be magic to pull this stuff out. So it really is on the professional to do that. So usually what we get is we see a game. He's right. We do see a game change from people because we've created a graphic that people can see and they can see what's going on. You can't argue against the pie chart. There it is. 71%. It's like there's data. There's a pie chart so everybody can see how big that is. Just make it simple. We don't hand you an 85 page document explaining it all in text. Why? 65 % of the audience are visual learners. Show them a picture. So once we did that and kind of walk them through and help them understand, they could see their city with new eyes. That's actually another quote that a mayor gave me in Davis, California. He goes, it's as if I've never been to this city called Davis and I could see it with new eyes Joe Minicozzi (59:16.886) So it's respecting them and honoring that their life is hard. Their role is near impossible. They've got to learn how a multi -billion dollar corporation operates the night after the election. And there's all of these habits baked into it. how do we short circuit that and make it easy for people to move? So we've seen changes. We've seen Rancho Cucamonga, California. They adopted a one to six rule for their downtown as an area to value ratio. So now they have like a two drink minimum, if you will. And there was a steel manufacturing company that came in for a tax break. And the assistant city manager told me, goes, you know, it's fun is after we did this math with you all, he goes, they came in and asked for a tax break and they're a big employer. But then I compared them on a per acre basis to other manufacturing plants in our city, these smaller ones, and they were actually way more beneficial than this big one. So I told the big one to take a hike. And it was like, that made my month. It's like, I couldn't believe he did that. But it was like, we gave them a new language to understand themselves. And as a consultant, it's like, yeah, I wasn't there for the win, but I feel proud of that. It's not sexy to talk about, but it's like, that's cool. So there's not as much satisfaction as being an architect when somebody lives in a house that you produce, but it's a different kind of satisfaction. Kevin K (01:00:52.003) Yeah, I really like the analogy of, it's almost like you're providing an MRI or a CAT scan. You're the doctor giving them critical information about the health of their community. And then really it's up to them to decide, do they want to correct that health or not? Joe Minicozzi (01:01:11.606) Well, it's value statement of our company too, that the doctor doesn't blame the patient. And so if you're going in and you're a smoker, chronic smoker your entire life, the doctor knows you're an addict. But what can the doctor provide you to help you get past your addiction? So the doctor is going to show you an MRI of your lungs and you're going to see the black spots all over the lungs. The doctor is going to be like, guess where that's coming from? Kevin K (01:01:14.083) Okay. Joe Minicozzi (01:01:40.128) and you'll say, it's my smoking. It'll be like, yeah, you want to keep doing it? It's up on you. I'm not going to be able to pull a cigarette out of your hand, but I have to do what I can to give you information to be an educated consumer. So that's kind of our MO. Kevin K (01:01:54.821) Joe, I think that's a great place to wrap. And if people are looking to find you and your company, what's the best place to go? Joe Minicozzi (01:02:06.552) Urban3 .com, three is all spelled out. You can also, there's plenty of videos online that you can Google through YouTube. My favorite one is the one that Not Just Bikes did on our work. Not Just Bikes is just a great resource for lots of information on city planning. And also Strong Towns covers a lot of our work. And also the Congress for New Urbanism. If anybody wants to come to a conference, the Congress for New Urbanism or the Strong Towns Gatherings are great. Or if you want to go deep nerd, we're like at the Government Finance Officers Association conferences every year. That's a whole lot of fun. So yeah, we'll see you around in public and thank you for doing all of Kevin K (01:02:54.405) Yeah, so really appreciate it, Joe. I'm sure we'll do some more in the future, but this is a great introduction for anybody who doesn't know your work. And also for those who do, I really appreciate the deeper dive. So hang in there. Keep doing what you're doing. And we'll talk again. All right. Joe Minicozzi (01:03:13.25) Thanks. Get full access to The Messy City at kevinklinkenberg.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why Georgism Lost Its Popularity, published by Zero Contradictions on July 21, 2024 on LessWrong. Henry George's 1879 book Progress & Poverty was the second best-selling book in the entire world during the 1880s and 1890s, outsold by only the Bible. Nobody knows exactly how many copies it sold during those two decades since nobody was keeping track, but it definitely sold at least several millions of copies for sure. The Progressive Era is literally named after the book itself. Georgism used to have millions of followers, and many of them were very famous people. When Henry George died in 1897 (just a few days before the election for New York City mayor), an estimated 100,000 people attended this funeral. The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was "By far the most famous American economic writer," and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written." Few people know it, but the board game Monopoly and its predecessor The Landlord's Game were actually created to promote the economic theories of Henry George, as noted in the second introduction paragraph of the Wikipedia article on board game Monopoly. The board games intend to show that economies that eliminate rent-seeking are better than ones that don't. So if Georgism used to have millions of supporters and solid economic reasoning, why did it never catch on and how did it lose its popularity over the past century? (see the rest of the post in the link) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why Georgism Lost Its Popularity, published by Zero Contradictions on July 21, 2024 on LessWrong. Henry George's 1879 book Progress & Poverty was the second best-selling book in the entire world during the 1880s and 1890s, outsold by only the Bible. Nobody knows exactly how many copies it sold during those two decades since nobody was keeping track, but it definitely sold at least several millions of copies for sure. The Progressive Era is literally named after the book itself. Georgism used to have millions of followers, and many of them were very famous people. When Henry George died in 1897 (just a few days before the election for New York City mayor), an estimated 100,000 people attended this funeral. The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was "By far the most famous American economic writer," and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written." Few people know it, but the board game Monopoly and its predecessor The Landlord's Game were actually created to promote the economic theories of Henry George, as noted in the second introduction paragraph of the Wikipedia article on board game Monopoly. The board games intend to show that economies that eliminate rent-seeking are better than ones that don't. So if Georgism used to have millions of supporters and solid economic reasoning, why did it never catch on and how did it lose its popularity over the past century? (see the rest of the post in the link) Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry George's Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, and his ideas were taken up by by powerful figures as diverse as Sun Yat-sen, Leo Tolstoy, and Theodor Herzl. Yet, in the 21st century, George is often reduced to a footnote in the history of the Gilded Age. In Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), Christopher William England uncovers the influence of Georgism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement's contributions to American liberalism. In surveying George's devotees and their impacts at the municipal and national levels, England demonstrates that George's ideas were pivotal in reconciling liberalism to a democratic welfare state. In this episode, we discuss George's land value tax, domestic and international Georgist movements, and the influence of Progress and Poverty on American and British liberalism. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) is an MPhil student in Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher England is the author of "Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism", a history of the land reform movement in the time of Henry George and after‒today on the program, we talk about the contours of the political strategy and history covered in this text, in particular the make-or-break years of 1900-1920. How were "the interests" addressed, and what lessons does this have for us today?

Dr. Rowland served in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as a Senior Project Manager for Environmental Remediation to help the city improve environmental quality. He has taught at various institutions, such as Pace University and here at the Henry George School of Social Science. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Asset Leadership Network, a group that promotes financial awareness to achieve social objectives. Dr. Marty Rowland earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and his master's from the University of New Orleans, both in Environmental Engineering. He later went on to earn his Ph.D. in Natural Resource Economics from the University of New Orleans as well. We were joined by Dr. Rowland to discuss Henry George's work on monetary policy and central banking, some critiques of George's analysis, and the difference between metal-backed currencies versus fiat currencies.  To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

Today's discussion was recorded in April of 2024, where our guest, Mr. Matthew Colantonio, joined us. Mr. Colantonio is an active community member and has focused his career on economic and community development. He was an AmeriCorps volunteer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he saw the importance of effective land and tax policy. Currently, he is a statistician at the State of Pennsylvania's Department of Health. Matt received his bachelor's degree in business from St. John's University, my alma mater, and his master's in applied economics from Boston College. Mr. Colantonio joined us in discussing the history of Pennsylvania, how Henry George's single tax can jumpstart Pittsburg's property sector, and why speculation tends to depress economic outcomes.  To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

Today's discussion came from our archives and was recorded in April of 2023. Our talk is hosted by Ed Dodson, who is joined by our guest, Dr. Christopher England. Dr. England is an Adjunct Lecturer at Georgetown University, and has also taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Loyola University, Maryland, and Stanford University. His courses focus on US history, the history of economic thought, political media, and social movements in America. His most recent book, Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism, focuses on the influence Henry George had on American politics and public sentiment towards policy. Examining firsthand accounts of George's correspondences with his followers, Dr. England traces the legacy of George's influence from the Progressive Movement to the New Deal Era. With a particular focus on land, natural resources, and rent-seeking, Dr. England observes how Georgism influenced public policy during these times to create a more egalitarian and democratic society.   Liberalism has meant different things at different times. Classical liberalism stood for limited government, free trade, or individual liberty. But the Progressive and New Deal era changed that. Liberalism began to shift towards new ways of thinking, like having a welfare state or social safety net, an activist government towards social problems, or an administrative state with more regulation. Henry George played a key role in influencing this shift. For a while, these ideas dominated leftward circles and made a real difference in people's lives. This changed in the late 1970s and early 80s with the Reagan Revolution. This is when the term “neo-liberal” entered into the popular conscience. Suddenly, being a liberal reverted to small government, individual responsibility, and led to the hollowing out of the state and a vast reduction in social services. This is, in part, what explains some of the poverty and inequality we experience today in advanced economies. Today's episode is significant for a number of reasons, but most importantly, it brings to the fore some of the ideas and concepts that originated from the Gilded Age. With the rise of inequality and the growth of massive corporations like Amazon, Apple, or Meta, some have now argued that we've entered into a new Gilded Age. This time, the Robber Barons have a new look to them. America's economy is far less industrial than it used to be. If you're into stocks or business, you've probably heard of the “Magnificent Seven,” a group of tech behemoths that make up a large part of the stock market. But these firms aren't just important to markets. They play a huge role in our lives, and it is only growing by the day. Many ideas have been floated as to how we deal with these companies, and this is why some of George's ideas merit further examination. Dr. England received his bachelor's degree in history and rhetoric from UC Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Georgetown in history. He's also a former Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.   Dr. England joined the Henry George School to discuss land reforms during the New Deal, how George transformed liberalism in the US and around the world, and how land and land markets impact economic and social crises. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

On today's show, activist and lecturer Alanna Hartzok explains the perennial earth rights wisdom (THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE) and the prosperity that is caused by the economics of Henry George. GUEST OVERVIEW: Alanna Hartzok is an educator, activist, and lecturer in the areas of economic justice, land rights, and commons rent public finance (per the work of 19th Century American economist Henry George). She is a United Nations NGO representative for the International Union for Land Value Taxation (theiu.org), the author of THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE and her recent EARTH RIGHTS MANIFESTO (available at Valediction.net/world-peace), and a proponent of the UN's Equinox Earth Day, the annual event honoring the original vision of John McConnell, the founder and creator of Earth Day.

To celebrate our 100th episode, we wanted to do a special podcast on Henry George and Georgism. It was recorded in November of 2023 by Nathan Greene, a researcher at the Henry George School, and Ed Dodson, a long-time faculty member. Ed is an expert on Henry George and all things Georgism. As a long-time subscriber of George, land value taxation, and land use reform, he is an excellent person to talk to for our centennial episode.   Henry George is an important figure in both American and economic history. His life led him to understand the world in a complex way that gave him a unique perspective. With this perspective, George looked to solve ecological and social problems through land rights, welfare, and social justice. This blend of philosophy and economics was the genesis of Georgism, an ideology that his followers believed would solve some of the most pressing issues of the time. George grew up during the Gold Rush and would eventually live through the Gilded Age. This was a time of massive inequality, major reforms, and rapid economic growth. The various places he lived instilled in George the need for greater fairness within society. One of his famous adages is, “Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.” George believed that through reflection and critical thinking, everyone can strive towards a better life for themselves, and their community. And this still rings true today. Henry George passed over a hundred years ago, but many of the problems he lived through still plague us today. Income and wealth inequality have skyrocketed. According to Pew Research, a well-known pollster, between 1983 to 2016, the share of wealth belonging to upper-income households increased from 60% to 79%. Meanwhile, the amount held by middle-income households has been reduced by half, decreasing from 32% to 17%. Lower-income households only had 4% of wealth in 2016, down from 7% in 1983. Meanwhile, millions of young people are shut out of the real estate market and can't afford their first house. I can't help but wonder what Henry George would say if he could see the state of the world in 2023. A history of George's life, how he formed his ideas, and the movements he inspired may help us parse that out. Mr. Dodson attended Shippensburg University and Temple University where he received an economics degree. Ed worked for Fannie Mae, a public-private partnership to help distribute home mortgage loans. During his time at Fannie Mae, Mr. Dodson held numerous management and analyst positions within the Housing & Community Development group, helping revitalize neighborhoods and local communities. This gives him an interesting perspective on land use and reform, and how it can reduce inequality. He also has extensive experience as a history lecturer at the Osher Life Long Learning Institute and the Learning is For Everyone program at Burlington County College. Ed has written many papers on history and the political economy and is the author of a three-volume book series titled "The Discovery of First Principles." Together, we discussed Henry George in the context of economic history, his ideas, and how the Georgist community can turn back into a movement. To check out more of our content, including our research and policy tools, visit our website: https://www.hgsss.org/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/smart-talk-hgsss/support

In his progressive society everyone has a "fair hope" of success --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rocky-seale7/message

GUEST OVERVIEW: Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould discuss their Fitzgerald family history, which they traced back 1,000 years to the defeat of the Fitzgeralds' rule in Ireland by the forces of Elizabeth I. That history, which Paul and Liz identify as Mystical Imperialism, led to JFK's assassination on November 22, 1963. It also inspired TrineDay Publishing's monthly Roundtables, where the economics of Henry George and JFK's plan for world peace are explored. valediction.net

GUEST OVERVIEW: Edward Dodson is the creator of the School of Cooperative Individualism (cooperative-individualism.org), which features the best writing and research on political economy and the social sciences, generally. Ed studied and taught at the Henry George School of Social Science in Philadelphia and wrote many articles promoting Henry George's political economy. (George was the most popular speaker in America in the late 1800s except for Mark Twain.) Ed is the author of a three-volume work, THE DISCOVERY OF FIRST PRINCIPLES. Videos of his courses and lectures are on his YouTube channel (Edward Dodson). And he had a long career in the financial services industry, including 20 years in management and analyst positions at Fannie Mae. cooperative-individualism.org

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

We speak about how politics, ideas, and culture are connected, if individuals and ideas shape social change more than institutional networks and social structures, the ideal of the neutral institution. We also speak about libertarianism, the problem of empathy, disability, gratitude, immigration, and much more. Henry George is a freelance writer living in the UK. He holds an MA in War Studies from King's College London. He is also on Twitter at @intothefuture45. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aksubversive/message

GUEST OVERVIEW: Alanna Hartzok is an educator, activist, and lecturer in the areas of economic justice, land rights, and commons rent public finance (per the work of 19th Century American economist Henry George). Alanna is also a United Nations NGO representative for the International Union for Land Value Taxation and the author of THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE and her recent EARTH RIGHTS MANIFESTO. https://valediction.net/world-peace/ 

Christopher England received his Ph.D. from Georgetown in 2015. His research and teaching focus on U.S. social movements, economic thought, and communications. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Loyola University Maryland, and Stanford University. His forthcoming book, Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism, is scheduled to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in February 2023. Land and Liberty traces the influence of the journalist Henry George, who argued that rising rents were the primary cause of economic inequality. England has been interviewed about his research for the upcoming PBS documentary The Monopolists and for articles in De Correspondent and Reason.  We discuss his book, Land and Liberty. Lars Doucet joins as a cohost for this episode.     

What role did Henry George play in the development of liberalism? Chris England is a lecturer at Georgetown University and author of the new book "Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism", and he joins the show to discuss George's place in American history and the history of liberalism. We discuss George's influence on liberal thought, why George's ideas became a huge political movement and then died out, how Georgists clashed with Progressives, and what we can learn from Georgism's rise and fall as a movement. Recommended reading: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12372/land-and-liberty Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast?  Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject https://cnliberalism.org/   Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/

Andrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In this interview he discusses his new book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Andrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In this interview he discusses his new book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Andrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In this interview he discusses his new book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrew Phemister is Research Associate at Newcastle University. He has previously held postdoctoral positions in History at NUI Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. In this interview he discusses his new book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Irish land in the 1880s was a site of ideological conflict, with resonances for liberal politics far beyond Ireland itself. The Irish Land War, internationalised partly through the influence of Henry George, the American social reformer and political economist, came at a decisive juncture in Anglo-American political thought, and provided many radicals across the North Atlantic with a vision of a more just and morally coherent political economy. Looking at the discourses and practices of these agrarian radicals, alongside developments in liberal political thought, Andrew Phemister shows how they utilised the land question to articulate a natural and universal right to life that highlighted the contradictions between liberty and property. In response to this popular agrarian movement, liberal thinkers discarded many older individualistic assumptions, and their radical democratic implications, in the name of protecting social order, property, and economic progress. Land and Liberalism thus vividly demonstrates the centrality of Henry George and the Irish Land War to the transformation of liberal thought. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Continuing on the theme of solutions to the housing crisis I interviewed economist Shreya Nanda about the Georgists and the YIMBYs.Georgists follow the ideas of the 19th century thinker and reformer Henry George and support a land value tax. YIMBYs (which stands for Yes In My Backyard) think the way to get out of the housing crisis is to build, build, build! Shreya classes herself as both a Georgist & a YIMBY, which made this a very fruitful conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If any figure of the Gilded Age has major relevance on the lives of the working class today - especially those that cannot or struggle to buy a home - it is Henry George. The best-selling author and single tax advocate offered Americans and the world a big idea that could change the way governments tax its people.Essential Reading:Christopher William England, Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023).Recommended Reading:Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879).Edward T. O'Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (2015).Phillip J. Bryson, The Economics of Henry George: History's Rehabilitation of America's Greatest Early Economist (2011).Mary M. Cleveland, "The Economics of Henry George: A Review Essay," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 71, no. 2 (April 2012): 498-511. Ramesh Chandra, "Allyn Young on Henry George and the Single Tax," Review of Political Economy 34, no. 4 (December 2022): 766-88. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism. Elizabeth J. Maggie Phillips was an American game designer writer, and feminist who was the creator. She invented The Landlord's Game, the precursor to Monopoly, to illustrate the teachings of the progressive era economist Henry George. Despite it all, the origins of capitalism came from racial capitalism. The concept of racial capitalism asserts that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing. Racial capitalism created the modern world system. During slavery, Black humans were seen as valuable for the profits that they made. As humans, they were devalued, dehumanized, and disposable. But the enslaved were the quintessential essential workers. They were essential for capital, but their lives are expandable to this day. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/omar-dejesus/message

LISTENER HIGHLIGHT! * Jim from Pennsylvania MAIL BAG! - Episode 21 feedback - So grateful to @CampingMeeple's (https://www.instagram.com/campingmeeple/) response to episode 21 - how to start a board game group:  "We are trying to keep a Board game day happening more often at our church, but it was actually interesting listening to your last episode because it's generally hobby people at ours and you were talking about card games and stuff a lot. I am a relatively newer convert to hobby games, but my addiction started at one of these events. Interestingly, I attended one a few years prior and it didn't stick the same way. But just like you said it generally needs to be accessible games not heavy and the last time I brought my 10 year old." - This episode - @Reengineerthegame (https://www.instagram.com/Reengineer_the_game/) offers this response to our question about spiritual lessons learned from cooperative games: "Humility is the first one that comes to mind. You can be humbled in competitive games by being out played but in cooperative games you can choose humility over being an “alpha player” or simply get beat by the game." What is a cooperative game? You win as a group against the board, and not against each other You share information and ideas, and sometimes even resources You have a shared objective (achieve a certain amount of goals) You coordinate your moves and plan out as a group what to do Note the original Monopoly game had 2 rules-sets, and the second one (that we don't play anymore) was cooperative. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_board_game): In 1903 Elizabeth Magie patented "The Landlord's Game", inspired by the principles and philosophy of Henry George. The Landlords' and designed as a protest against the monopolists of the time, the game is considered to be the game from which Monopoly was largely derived. In it, Magie had two rule-sets - the Monopoly rules, in which players all vied to accrue the largest revenue and crush their opponents, and a co-operative set. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the co-operative rules were morally superior. Spiritual Lessons Learning to take turns and moves that help the group and not yourself. Learning that diversity of gifts is important. Many cooperative games assign roles with special powers. Everyone has a different role to play. See 1 Corinthians 12 & Romans 12 in the Christian Bible. Encouraging everyone to participate in a low-stress way; cooperative games allow players to give and receive advice on what to do in a turn. The importance of trusting others' choices. Sometimes we have to let others fail in order to respect that actions and choices. Individual achievement can feel different from communal achievement. A shared victory is much sweeter in the end, don't you think? NEXT EPISODE - KEVIN: REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING SPIRITUALITY & BOARD GAMES! THANK YOU! CALL TO ACTION: - Subscribe to our newsletter (https://buttondown.email/BoardGameFaith) - Support us on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/boardgamefaith/) - interact with us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/boardgamefaith/) - Discord us Discord (https://discord.gg/MRqDXEJZ).

In today's episode, Will Holley (Founder of 721 Labs), Graven Prest (Co-Founder of the Geo Web project), and Kevin Seagraves (CEO of NiftyApes) are three mission-focused entrepreneurs who join host Matt Prewitt in a roundtable discussion on the topic of Plural Property — RadicalxChange's umbrella term for Partial Common Ownership, Harberger Taxation, Self-Assessed Licenses Sold via Auction or SALSA, and Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax or COST.NOTE: This is a regular season episode of the RadicalxChange(s) podcast. Our mini season of "A New Era of Democracy" will continue following this episode.Links for Today's Episode:RxC Plural Property Concept Page721 LabsCityDAOGeo WebNiftyApesHarberger Style Lending AuctionsConnect with RxC:Follow us on Twitter.Visit our website.Join the conversation on Discord.Will Holley (he/him) is the founder of 721 Labs, a research and development company focused on Ethereum token standards and mechanism design. He is also the founder of CityDAO's Network City initiative, the first IRL experiment using Partial Common Ownership, Harberger Taxes and Quadratic Funding to coordinate efficient private market funding of public goods.  Will first engaged with Radical ideas and Web3 in 2020, after selling his last startup, a collectibles marketplace.  A software engineer by training, Will previously worked in the fine art world, building machine learning models to predict auction results for Sotheby's and Christie's.Graven Prest (he/him) is an entrepreneur and mechanism designer in the Web3 space. He's the co-founder of the Geo Web project (@TheGeoWeb)—an open protocol that creates consensus for browsing digital media anchored to physical locations (i.e. geospatial augmented reality). The network protocol uses partial common ownership to administer its digital land market and fund public goods.Kevin Seagraves (he/him) has been building in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017. He was the lead engineer of Gitcoin Grants v0, co-author of EIP-1337, and a co-founder of the ETHSecurity community. Later he went on to lead product at Charge before returning to the Gitcoin family and contributing to the Moonshot Collective and Scaffold-eth. He is now the CEO at NiftyApes, building tools for NFT traders, and is the creator of Harberger Style Lending Auctions. Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation. Episode CreditsExecutive produced by G. Angela Corpus and Matt Prewitt.Co-Produced, Edited, and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.Produced by G. Angela Corpus and Aaron Benavides.Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)This is a RadicalxChange Production.

(00:00) Intro (1:37) Creation of Monopoly (6:04) Henry George (9:05) 'Landlord's Game' (11:52) Charles Darrow (14:48) Parker Brothers (16:05) Monopoly sales today (20:10) Original game intentions (24:41) Outro Chief joins the show to talk about the history behind the 'Monopoly' board game. We get into the game Monopoly was based off of, how the original creator was cut out of the deal, what Monopoly sales are like today, and more.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/thedogwalk

One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase.Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it.We go deep into the weeds on Georgism:* Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as wages?* Why are land-owners able to extract the profits that rightly belong to labor and capital?* How would taxing the value of land alleviate speculation, NIMBYism, and income and sales taxes?Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow Lars on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:11) - Georgism(00:03:16) - Metaverse Housing Crises(00:07:10) - Tax Leisure?(00:13:53) - Speculation & Frontiers(00:24:33) - Social Value of Search (00:33:13) - Will Georgism Destroy The Economy?(00:38:51) - The Economics of San Francisco(00:43:31) - Transfer from Landowners to Google?(00:46:47) - Asian Tigers and Land Reform(00:51:19) - Libertarian Georgism(00:55:42) - Crypto(00:57:16) - Transitioning to Georgism(01:02:56) - Lars's Startup & Land Assessment (01:15:12) - Big Tech(01:20:50) - Space(01:23:05) - Copyright(01:25:02) - Politics of Georgism(01:33:10) - Someone Is Always Collecting RentsTranscriptThis transcript was partially autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Lars Doucet - 00:00:00: Over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism, so not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book. If you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line. Let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. The income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich. And it's just this horrible burden we have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:00:39: Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Lars Doucet, who developed the highly acclaimed Defender's Quest game and part two is coming out next year, but now he's working on a new startup. But the reason we're talking is that he wrote a review of Henry George's progress and poverty that won Scott Alexander's Book Review Contest and now it has been turned into an expanded into this book Land is a Big Deal. So Lars, welcome to the podcast. New Speaker: Great to be here, Dwarkesh . Okay, so let's just get into it. What is Georgism? Lars Doucet - 00:01:12: Okay, so the book is based off of the philosophy of a 19th century American economist by the name of Henry George from once we get George's and basically George's thesis is kind of the title of my book that land is a big deal. Georgism is often reduced to its main policy prescription that we should have a land value tax, which is a tax on the unimproved value of land, but not a tax on any buildings or infrastructure on top of the land, anything humans add. But the basic insight of it is that it's kind of reflected in the aphorisms you hear from real estate agents when they say things like the three laws of real estate or location location location and buy land, it's the one thing they're not making any more of. It's basically this insight that land has this hidden role in the economy that is really underrated. But if you look at history through the right lens, control over land is the oldest struggle of human history. It goes beyond human history. Animals have been fighting over land forever. That's what they're fighting over in Ukraine and Russia right now, right? And basically the fundamental insight of Georgism is that over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. And Georgism is genuinely pro pro worker and pro business. But what it's against is is land speculation. And if we can find a way to share the earth, then we can solve the paradox that is the title of George's book, progress and poverty, why does poverty advance even when progress advances? Why do we have all this industrialized technology and new methods and it in George's time it was industrial technology in our time its computers and everything else? We have all this good stuff. We can make more than we've ever made before. There's enough wealth for everybody. And yet we still have inequality. Where does it come from? And George answers that question in his book. And I expand on it in mine. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:03:15: Yep. OK, so yeah, I'm excited to get into the theory of all of it in a second. But first I'm curious how much of your interest in the subject has been inspired with the fact that as a game developer, you're constantly dealing with decentralized rent seekers, like Steve or iOS app store. Is that part of the inspiration behind your interest in Georgism or is that separate? Lars Doucet - 00:03:38: It's interesting. I wouldn't say that's what clued me into it in the first place. But I have become very interested in all forms of rent seeking. In this general category of things we call land-like assets that come to first mover advantages in these large platform economies. I've started to think a lot about it basically. But the essence of land speculation is you have this entire class of people who are able to basically gatekeep access to a scarce resource that everybody needs, which is land, that you can't opt out of needing. And because of that, everyone basically has to pay them rent. And those people don't necessarily do anything. They just got there first and tell everyone else, it's like, well, if you want to participate in the world, you need to pay me. And so we're actually the actual connection with game development, actually clued me into Georgism. And I'd heard about Georgism before. I'd read about it. I thought it was interesting. But then I started noticing this weird phenomenon in online multiplayer games going back 30 years repeatedly of virtual housing crises, which is the most bizarre concept in the world to me, like basically a housingcrisis in the Metaverse and predecessors to the Metaverse. And as early as the Alt Online (?)online when I was 19, this is this online game that you could play. And you could build houses in the game and put them down somewhere. And so what I found was that houses were actually fairly cheap. You could work long enough in a game to be afford to buy blueprints for a house, which will be put it somewhere. But there was no land to put it on. And at the time, I thought, oh, well, I guess the server failed up. I didn't really think much about it. I was like, this stinks. I didn't join the game early enough. I'm screwed out of housing. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then 20 years later, I checked back in. And that housing crisis is still ongoing in that game. That game is still running a good 25 years later. And that housing crisis remains unsolved. And you have this entire black market for housing. And then I noticed that that trend was repeated in other online games, like Final Fantasy 14. And then recently in 2022, with all this huge wave of crypto games, like Axi Infinity, and that's Decentral Land and the Sandbox. And then Yuga Labs' Board-Ape Yacht Club, the other side, had all these big land sales. And at the time, I was working as an analyst for a video game consulting firm called Novik. And I told my employers, it's like, we are going to see all the same problems happen. We are going to see virtual land speculation. They're going to hit virtual. They're going to reproduce the conditions of housing crisis in the real world. And it's going to be a disaster. And I called it, and it turns out I was right. And we've now seen that whole cycle kind of work itself out. And it just kind of blew my mind that we could reproduce the problems of the real world so articulately in the virtual world without anyone trying to do it. It just happened. And that is kind of the actual connection between my background in game design and kind of getting George Pilled as the internet kids call it these days. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:06:43: There was a hilarious clip. Some comedian was on Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it was like Tim Dillon. And they're talking about, I think, Decentraland, where if you want to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the Metaverse, it costs like a couple million dollars or something. And Joe Rogan was like, so you think you can afford to live there. And then Tim Dillon's like, no, but I'm going to start another Metaverse and I'm going to work hard. But OK, so let's go into Georgism himself. So Tyler Cohen had a blog post a long time ago who was comparing taxing land to taxing unimproved labor or unimproved capital. And it's an interesting concept, right? Should I, so I have a CS degree, right? Should I be taxed at the same level as an entry level software engineer instead of a podcast or because I'm not using my time as efficiently as possible. And so leisure in another way is the labor equivalent of having an unimproved parking lot in the middle of San Francisco or capital. If I'm just keeping my capital out of the economy and therefore making it not useful, maybe I should have that capital taxed at the rate of the capital gains on T-Bill. And this way, you're not punishing people for having profitable investments, which you're kind of doing with a capital gains, right? What would you think of that comparison? Lars Doucet - 00:08:07: Yeah, so really, before you can even answer that question, you've got to go back to ground moral principles you're operating on. Like, is your moral operating principle like we just want to increase efficiency? So we're going to tax everyone in a way to basically account for the wasted opportunity cost, which brings up a lot of other questions of like, well, who decides what that is. But I think the Georgist argument is a little different. We're not necessarily like it is efficient, the tax we propose, but it actually stems kind of from a more, from a different place, a more kind of fundamental aspect of justice, you know? And from our perspective, if you work and you produce value, your work produced that value, right? And if you save money and accumulate capital in order to put that capital to work to receive a return, you've also provided something valuable to society, you know? You saved money so a factory could exist, right? You saved money so that a shipping company could get off off the ground. You know, those are valuable, contributed things, but nobody made the earth. The earth pre-exists all of us. And so someone who provides land actually does the opposite of providing land. They unprovide land, and then they charge you for opening the gate. And so the argument for charging people on the unimproved value of land is that we want to tax unproductive rent seeking. We want to tax non-produced assets because we think we want to encourage people to produce assets. We want to encourage people to produce labor, to produce capital. We want more of those things. And there's that aphorism that if you want less of something, you should tax it. So I mean, maybe there is a case for some kind of galaxy brain take of, you know, taxing unrealized opportunity costs or whatever, but I'm less interested in that. And my moral principles are more about, let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. And then if we still need to raise more taxes, we can talk about that later. But let's start with, let's start with just taxing the worst things in society and then stop taxing things we actually want more of because we have this mentality right now where everything's a trade off and we have to accept the downsides of income taxes, of sales taxes, of capital taxes because we just need the revenue and it has to come from somewhere. And my argument is it's like, it can come from a much better somewhere. So let's start with that.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:10:39: Yeah, yeah. So I guess if it was the case that we've implemented a land value tax and we're still having a revenue shortfall and we need another kind of tax and we're going to have to keep income taxes or capital gains taxes. Would you in that situation prefer a sort of tax where you're basically taxed on the opportunity costs of your time rather than the actual income you generated or the returns you would interest your generate in your capital? Lars Doucet - 00:11:04: No, I think probably not. I think you would probably want to go with some other just like simpler tax for the sake of it there's too many degrees of freedom in there. And it's like, we can talk about why I will defend the Georgist case for property tax assessments, you know, for land value tax. But I think it gets different when you start like judging what is the most valuable use of your time because that's a much more subjective question. Like you're like, okay, are you providing more value to society as being a podcaster or being a CS computer science person or creating a startup? It's like that may not be evident for some time. You know what I mean? Like I can't think of an example, but like think of people who were never successful during their lifetimes. I think the guy who invented what was it? FM radio, right? He threw himself out a window because he never got it really adopted during his lifetime but it went on to change everything, you know? So if we were taxing him during his lifetime based off of what he was doing of being a failure, like if Van Gogh was taxed of his like wasting his life as an artist as he thought he was, which ultimately led to his suicide, you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily realized at the time. And so I think that's, and you know, it would need a much bigger kind of bureaucracy to like figure that all out. So I think you should go with a more modest. I mean, I think after land value tax, you should do things like severance tax on natural resources and other taxes on other monopolies and rents. And so I think the next move after land value tax is not immediately to capital and income taxes and sales taxes, but to other taxes on other rents seeking and other land like assets that aren't literally physically land. And then only after you've done all of those, if you still, you know, absolutely then, then move on to, you know, the bad taxes. What is this, severance tax? Severance tax is a tax on the extraction of natural resources. Is what Norway does with their oil industry that has been massively successful and a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse? Yeah. Basically, it's, Georgist purist will say it's essentially a land value tax but of a different kind. A land value tax like you can't normally like extracts just like land like on this, in this house you're living on, you're like, you're not using up this land, but non-renewable resources you can use up. Yeah. You know, and so a severance tax is basically, Nestle should be charged a severance tax for the water they're using, for instance, you know, because all they're doing is enclosing a pre-existing natural resource that used to belong to the people that they've essentially enclosed and now they're just putting it in bottles and selling it to people. You know, they should be able to realize the value of the value add they give to that water, but not to just taking that resource away. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:13:53: No that makes sense. Okay, so let's go deep into the actual theory and logic of Georgism. Okay. One thing I was confused by is why property owners who have land in places that are really desirable are not already incentivized to make the most productive use of that land. So even without a property, sorry, a land tax, if you have some property in San Francisco incentives, let's go, why are you not incentivized to construct it to the fullest extent possible by the law, to, you know, collect rents anyways, you know what I mean? Like why are you keeping it that as a parking lot? Lars Doucet - 00:14:28: Right, right, right. So there's a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with, there's an image in the book that this guy put together for me. I'll show it to you later. But what it does is that it shows the rate of return. What a land speculator is actually optimizing for is their rate of return, right? And so if land appreciates by 10% a year, you know, you're actually incentivized to invest in vacant land or a tear down property because the building of a tear down property is like worth negative value. So the land's cheaper because there's garbage on it, you know? Then you are to necessarily invest in a property and you're basically your marginal dollar is better spent on more land than it is on building up. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:15:16: But eventually shouldn't this be priced into the price of land so that the returns are no longer 10% or they're just like basically what you could get for any other asset. And at that point, then the rate of return is similar for building thingson top of your existing land than buying a new land because like the new land is like the, you know, that return has been priced into other land. Lars Doucet - 00:15:38: Well, I mean, arguably, empirically, we just don't see that, you know, and we see rising land prices as long as productivity and population increases. Those productivity and population gains get soaked into the price of the land. It's because of this phenomenon called Ricardo's Law of Rent and it's been pretty empirically demonstrated that basically, and it has to do with the negotiation power. But like why some people do of course, build and invest, you know, there's a lot of local laws that restrict people's ability to build. But another reason is just like, it also has to do with the existing part of it. It part of the effect is partially the existing property tax regime actively incentivizes empty lots because you have a higher tax burden if you build, right? So what actually happens is a phenomenon that's similar to oil wells, right? You have, it's not just because of property taxes, those do encourage you to keep it empty. But there's this phenomenon called land banking and waiting for the land to ripen, right? Sure, I could build it now, but I might have a lot of land parcels I've got. And I don't need to build it now because I think the prices might go up later and it would be better to build on it later than it is now. And it's not costing me anything to keep it vacant now. If I build now, I'm gonna have to pay a little bit more property taxes. And I know in three years that the price is gonna be even better. So maybe I'll wait to incur those construction costs then and right now I'm gonna focus more on building over here. And like I've got a lot of things to do, so I'm just gonna squat on it here. It's the same way I have, I'm squatting like, you know, I bought to my shame, like about 30 domain names, you know, most of them bought before I kind of got ontoGeorgism. And it's like, yeah, I'll pay 15 bucks a year to just hold it, why not? You know what I mean? I might use that someday. Right. And it's like, I should probably release all the ones I have no intent of using because I was looking for a domain for my startup the other day and every single two word.com is taken. Right, right. And it has been for like 10 years, you know, and it's a similar phenomenon. It's just like some of it is economic, rational following of incentives. And some of it is just it's like, well, this is a good asset. I'm just gonna hold on to it because why not? And no one is, and I don't have any pressure to build right now. And this happens on the upswing and on the downswing of cities. So while the population's growing and while the population's declining, people will just buy a lot of land and hold it out of use. Cause it's also just a great place to park money because it's an asset that you know if the population ever starts growing, it's gonna keep its value better than almost any other hard asset you have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:18:16: Yep yep. I guess another like broader criticism of this way of thinking is, listen, this is all, and sorry for using these like podcast lingo of scarcity mindset, but this is all like scarcity mindset of, you know, land is limited. Well, why don't we just focus on the possibility of expanding the amount of usable land? I mean, there's like not really a shortage of land in you. Maybe there's a shortage of land in urban areas. But you know, why don't we like expand into the seas? And why don't we expand into the air and space? Why are we thinking in this sort of scarce mindset? Lars Doucet - 00:18:48: Right. Okay, so I love this question because actually our current status quo mindset is the scarcity mindset. And Georgism is the abundance mindset, right? And we can have that abundance if we learn to share the land. Because right now, you know, why don't we expand? And the answer is we've tried that. We've done it twice. And it's the story of America's frontier, right? And so like right now there's plenty of empty land in Nevada, but nobody wants it. And you have to ask why, right? You also have to ask the question of how did we have virtual housing crises in the Metaverse where they could infinitely expand all they want? Like how is that even possible, you know? And the answer has to do with what we call the urban agglomeration effect. What's really valuable is human relationships, proximity to other human beings, those dense networks of human beings. And so the idea is not necessarily that like, in a certain sense, the issue is that land is not an indistinguishable, fungible commodity. Location really matters. Or America has a finite amount of land, but it might as well be an infinite plane. We're not going to fill up every square inch of America for probably thousands of years if we ever do, right? But what is scarce is specific locations. They're non-fungible, you know? And to a certain extent, it's like, okay, if you don't want to live in New York, you can live in San Francisco or any other like big city. But what makes New York New York is non-fungible What makes San Francisco San Francisco is non-fungible That particular cluster of VCs in San Francisco until or unless that city completely explodes and that moves somewhere else to Austin or whatever, you know, at which point, Austin will be non-fungible. I mean, Austin is non-fungible right now. And so the point is that the way Georgism unlocks the abundance of it, let me talk about the frontier. We have done frontier expansion. That is why immigrants came over from Europe, you know, and then eventually the rest of the world, to America to, you know, settle the frontier. And the losers of that equation were, of course, the Indians who were already here and got kicked out. But that was theoriginal idea of America. And I like to say that America's tragedy, America's problem is that America is a country that has the mindset of being a frontier state, but is in fact a state which has lost its frontier. And that is why you have these conversations with people like boomers who are like, why can't the next generation just pull itself up by its bootstraps? Because America has had at least, I would say two major periods of frontier expansion. The first was the actual frontier, the West, the Oregon Trail, the covered wagons, you know, the displacement of the Indians. And so that was a massive time, that was the time in which Henry George was writing, was right when that frontier was closing, right? When all that land, that free land was being taken, and the advantages of that land was now being fully priced in. That is what it means for a frontier to close, is that now the good productive land, the value of it is fully priced in. But when the frontier is open, you can just go out there and take it, and you can get productive land and realize the gains of that. And the second frontier expansion was after Henry George's death, was the invention of the automobile, the ability to have a job in the city, but not have to live in the city. The fact that you could quickly travel in, like I commuted in to visit you here, right? That is because of the automobile frontier opening that has allowed me to live in some other city, but be able to do productive work like this podcast by driving in. But the problem is, sprawl can only take you so far, before that frontier as well closes, and by closes I don't mean suburban expansion stops. What I mean is that now, suburban homes, you fully price in the value of the benefits are able to accrue by having that proximity to a city, but still being able to live over here, through of course, for Ricardo's Law for it. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:22:37: Yeah, but I feel like this is still compatible with the story of, we should just focus on increased in technology and abundance, rather than trying to estimate how much rent is available now, given current status quo technologies. I mean, the car is a great example of this, but imagine if there were like flying cars, right? Like there's a, where's my flying car? There's like a whole analysis in that book about, you know, if you could, if people are still commuting like 20 minutes a day, you know, a lot more land is actually in the same travel distance as was before, and now all this land would be worth as much, even in terms of relationships that you could accommodate, right? So why not just build like flying cars instead of focusing on land rent? Lars Doucet - 00:23:21: Well, because these things have a cost, right? The cost of frontier expansion was murdering all the Indians and the cost of automobile expansion was climate change. You know, there has to be a price for that. And then eventually, the problem is you eventually, when you get to the end of that frontier expansion, you wind up with the same problem we had in the first place. Eventually, the problem is the first generation will make out like gangbusters if we ever invent flying cars, even better like Star Trek matter teleporters. You know, that'll really do it. Then you can really live in Nevada and have a job in New York. Yeah. There are some people who claim that Zoom is this, but it's not, you know, we've seen the empirical effects of that and it's like, it's the weakest like semi-frontier we've had and it's already closed. Because, because of Zoom, houses like this over in Austin have gone up in value because there is demand for them and there's demand for people to telecommute. And so anyone who, so the increased demand for living out in the suburbs is now basically priced in because of the Zoom economy. And so the thing is the first people who did that, who got there really quick, the first people to log in to the ultimate online server were able to claim that pace of the frontier and capture that value. But the next generation has to pay more in rent and more in home prices to get that. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:24:34: Actually, that raises another interesting criticism ofGeorgism, this is actually a paper from Zachary Gouchanar and Brian Kaplan, where it was titled the Cerseioretic critique of Georgism, and the point they made was one of these, like one way of thinking about the improvement to land is actually identifying that this land is valuable. Maybe because you realize it has like an oil well in it and maybe you realize that it's like the perfect proximity to these like Chinese restaurants and this mall and whatever. And then just finding which land is valuable is actually something that takes capital and also takes, you know, like you deciding to upend your life and go somewhere, you know, like all kinds of effort. And that is not factored into the way you would conventionally think of the improvements to land that would not be taxed, right? So in some sense, you getting that land is like a subsidy for you identifying that the land is valuable and can be used to productive ends. Lars Doucet - 00:25:30:Right, yeah, I know. So I've read that paper. So first of all, the first author of that Zachary Gouchanar yeah, I'm not been able to pin him down on what exactly meant on this, but he's made some public statements where he's revised his opinion since writing that paper and that he's much more friendly to the arguments ofGeorgism now than when he first wrote that paper. So I'd like to pin him down and see exactly what he meant by that because it was just a passing comment. But as regards Kaplan's critique, Kaplan's critique only applies to a 100% LVT where you fully capture all of the land value tax. And the most extreme Georgists I know are only advocating for like an 85% land value tax. That would still leave. And Kaplan doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation. He's making a speculation is good actually argument. And even if we grant his argument, he still needs to grapple with all the absolutely empirically observed problems of land speculation. And if we want to make some kind of compromise between maybe speculation could have this good discovery effect, there's two really good answers to that. First, just don't do 100% LVT, which we probably can't practically do anyway because of natural limitations just empirically, you know, in the signal. It's like you don't want to do 115% land value tax. That drives people off the land. So we want to make sure that we like have a high land value tax but make sure not to go over. And so that would leave a sliver of land rent that would still presumably incentivize this sort of thing. There's no argument for why 100% of the land rent is necessary to incentivize the good things that Kaplan was talking about. The second argument is when he talks about oil, well, we have the empirical evidence from the Norwegian massively successful petroleum model that shows in the case of natural resources how you should deal with this. And what Norway does is that they have a massive, massively huge severance tax on oil extraction. And according to Kaplan's argument, this should massively destroy the incentive for companies to go out there and discover the oil. And empirically, it doesn't. Now what Norway does is that they figured out, okay, so the oil companies, their argument is that we need the oil rents, right? We need these oil rents where we will not be incentivized for the massive capital cost of offshore oil drilling. Well, Norway's like, well, if you just need to cover the cost of offshore oil drilling, we'll subsidize that. We'll just pay you. We'll just pay you to go discover the oil. But when you find the oil, that oil belongs to the Norwegian people. Now you may keep some of the rents but most of it goes to the Norwegian people. But hey, all your R&D is free. All your discovery is free. If the problem is discovery, we just subsidize discovery. And then the oil companies are like, okay, that sounds like a great deal. We don't have to, because without that, what the oil companies do is that they're like, okay, we're taking all these risks. So I'm gonna sit on all these oil wells like people sitting on domain names because I might use them later and the price might go up later. But now because there's a huge severance tax, you're forced to drill now and you're actually, you're actual costs of discovery and R&D and all those capital costs are just taken care of. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:28:26: But isn't there a flip side to that where I mean, one of the economic benefits of speculation, obviously there's drawbacks. But one of the benefits is that it gets rid of the volatility and prices where our speculator will buy when it's cheap and sell when the price is high. And in doing so, they're kind of making the asset less volatile over time. And if you're basically going to tell people who have oil on their land, like we're gonna keep taxing you. If you don't take it out, you're gonna keep getting taxed. You're encouraging this massive glut of a finite resource to be produced immediately, which is bad. If you think we might need that reserve in the ground 20 years from now or 30 years from now, you know, went oil reserves were running low. Lars Doucet - 00:29:10: Not necessarily, you know? And so the problem is that speculation in the sense you're talking about if like encouraging people to do arbitrage is good for capital because we can make more capital. But we can't make more land and we can't make more non-renewable natural resources. And the issue in peer, and I just think the evidence just doesn't support that empirically because if anything, land speculation has causes land values to just constantly increase, not to find some natural part, especially with how easy it is to finance two thirds of bank loans just chase real estate up. And that's just like, if you just look at the history of the prices of, you know, of residential real estate in America, it's like, it's not this cyclical graph where it like keeps going back down. It keeps going back down, but it keeps going up and up and up, just on a straight line along with productivity. And it underlines and undergirds, major issues, everything that's driving our housing crisis, which then undergirds so much of inequality and pollution and climate change issues. And so with regards to speculations, like even if I just bite that bull and it's like, okay, speculation is good actually, I don't think anyone's made the case that speculators need to capture a hundred percent of the rents to be properly incentivized to do anything good that comes out of speculation. I think at some small reasonable percentage, you know, five to 10 percent of the rents, maybe 15 if I'm feeling generous, but I don't think anyone's empirically made the case that it should be a hundred percent, which is more or less a status quo. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:31:I mean, with regards to that pattern of the fact that the values tend to keep going up implies that there's nothing cyclical that the speculators are dampening. Lars Doucet - 00:30:41: Well, there are cycles to be sure, but it's not like, it's something that resets to zero. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:45: Yeah, but that's also true of like the stock market, right? Over time that goes up, but speculators are still have like an economic role to play in a stock market of making sure prices are, Lars Doucet - 00:30:55: I mean, the difference is that people are now paying an ever increasing portion of their incomes to the land sector. And that didn't used to be the case. And if it keeps going, it's going to be, I mean, you have people are now paying 50% of their income just for rent. And that's not sustainable in the long term. You're going to have the cycle you have there is revolution. You know, you, you know, Dwarkesh Patel - 00:31:16: (laughing) Lars Doucet - 00:31:17: I'm serious. like what happens is like you look through history, you either have land reform or you have revolution. And you know, it's, it's either like either you have a never ending cycle of, of, of transfers of income from the unlanded to the landed. And eventually the, the unlanded will not put up with that. You know, there was a real chance in the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century of America going full on socialist or communist and the only thing that saved us. What, and George's argument was like, it's either Georgism or communism. And if you want to save capitalism and not go toTotalitarian, we need Georgismand then what George failed to anticipate was, you, of course, the automobile. And the automobile kicked the can down another generation, another couple generations, right? And it came at the cost of sprawl. And that made everyone feel like we had solved the issue. But basically we just, and the cost of sprawl are enormous in terms of pollution and poor land use. Just look at Houston right now, right? But now we've come at the end of that frontier and now we're at the same question. And it's like, you see this research in interest in leftism in America and that's not a coincidence, right? Because the rent is too damn high and poor people and poor people and young people feel really, really shoved out of the promise and social contract that was given to their parents and they're jealous of it and they're wondering where it went. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:32:36: Yeah, yeah. Actually, you just mentioned that a lot of bank loans are given basically so you can like get a mortgage and get a house that's like towards land. There was an interesting question on Twitter that I thought was actually pretty interesting about this. I can't find the name of the person who asked it. So sorry, I can't give you credit, but they basically asked if that's the case and if most bank loans are going towards helping you buy land that's like artificially more expensive, but now you implement a land value tax and all these property values crash. Oh yeah. Well, when we see just, and then all these mortgages are obviously they can't pay them back. Lars Doucet - 00:33:13: Right, right, right. Are we gonna destroy the banking sector? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:33:15: Exactly. We'll have like a great, great depression.Lars Doucet - 00:33:17: Well, I mean, if you, okay, so like this is, this is kind of like, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to compare landlords to slave owners or something, but it's like, it's like the South had an entire economy based off of slavery. This thing that like we now agree was bad, right? And it's like we shouldn't have kept slavery because the, the South, the, like it really disrupted the Southern Economy when we got rid of slavery, but it was still the right thing to do. And so I mean, there is no magic button I could push as much as I might like to do so that will give us 100% land value tax everywhere in America tomorrow. So I think the actual path towards a Georgist Future is gonna have to be incremental. There'll be enough time to unwind all those investments and get to a more sane banking sector. So I mean, like if we were to go overnight, yeah, I think there would be some shocks in the banking sector and I can't predict what those would be, but I also don't think that's a risk that's actually gonna happen. Because like we just, we just cannot make a radical change like that on all levels overnight. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:34:13: Yeah yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's get back to some of these theoretical questions. One I had was, I guess I don't fully understand the theoretical reason for thinking that you can collect arbitrarily large rents. Why doesn't the same economic principle of competition, I get that there's not infinite landowners, but there are multiple landowners in any region, right? So if for the same reason that profit is competed away in any other enterprise, you know, if one landowner is extracting like $50 a profit a month, and another landowner is extracting, you know, like whatever, right? Like a similar amount of $50. One of them, and they're both competing for the same tenant. One of them will decrease their rent so that the tenant will come to them and the other one will do the same and the bidding process continues until all the profits are, you know,bidded away. Lars Doucet - 00:35:04: Right, so this is Ricardo's law front, right? And there's a section on in the book with a bunch of illustrations you can show. And so the issue is that we can't make more land, right? And so you might be like, well, there's plenty of land in Nevada, but the point is there's only so much land in Manhattan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:35:19: But the people who have land inManhattan, why aren't they competing against themselves or each other? Lars Doucet - 00:35:23: Right, well, what they do is because the nature of the scarcity of there's only so many locations in Manhattan and there's so many people who want to live there, right? And so all the people who want to live there have to outbid each other. And so basically, so like, let me give a simple agricultural example model. And then I will explain how the agricultural model translates to a residential model. Basically, when you are paying to live in an urban area, or even a suburban area like here in Austin, what you're actually paying for is the right to have proximity to realize the productive capacity of that location. IE, I want to live in Austin because I can have access to a good job, you know what I mean? Or whatever is cool about Austin, a good school, those amenities. And the problem is you have to pay for those and you have to outbid other people who are willing to pay for those. And Ricardo's Rolf Rent says that the value of the amenities and the productivity of an area, as it goes up, that gets soaked into the land prices. And the mechanism by that is that it's like, okay, say I want to buy a watermelon, right? And there's only one watermelon left out bid that guy. But the watermelon growers can be like, oh, a lot of people want watermelon. So next season, there's going to be more watermelons because he's going to produce more watermelons. But because there's only so many locations in Austin, you know, within the natural limits of our transportation network, basically it forces the competition on the side of the people who are, essentially the tenants, right? It forces us into one side of competition with each other. And that, and so there's an example of like, a simple agricultural example is like, okay, say there is a common field that anyone can work on and you can make 100 units of wealth if you work on it, right? So, and there's another field that you can also learn 100 units of wealth in, but it's owned by a landowner. Why would you, why would you go and work on the landowners when you're going to have to pay them rent? You wouldn't pay them any rent at all. You would work on the field that's free, but if the landowner buys that field and now your best opportunity is a field that's only worth a free field that will produce 10 units of wealth, now he can charge you 90 units of wealth becauseyou have no opportunity to go anywhere else. And so basically as more land gets bought and subject to private ownership in an area, landowners over time get to increase the rent, not to a maximum level, there are limits to it. And the limits is what's called the margin of production, which is basically you can charge up to, and this is where the competition comes in, the best basic like free alternative, you know, and that's usually, you can realize that geographically, like out on the margins of Austin, there's marginal land that basically is available for quite cheap, you know, and it might be quite far away, and it used to be not so quite far away 20, 30 years ago, you know, and so as that margin slowly gets privatized, landowners can charge up to that margin. The other limit is subsistence, that can't charge more than you're actually able to pay, but the basic example is that, so this is why this is how frontier expansion works. When the entire continent's free, the first settler comes in, strikes a pick in the ground, keeps all of their wealth, but as more and more of it gets consolidated, then landowners are able to charge proportionately more until they're charging essentially up to subsistence. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:38:51: Yeah, does that explain property values in San Francisco? I mean, they are obviously very high, but I don't feel like they're that high where this offer engineers were working at Google or living as subsistence levels, neither are they at the margin of reduction where it's like, this is what it would cost to live out in the middle of California, and then commute like three hours to work or something. Lars Doucet - 00:39:13: Right, well, so it has to do with two things. So first of all, it's over the long run, and so it's like, you've had a lot of productivity booms in San Francisco, right? And so it takes some time for that to be priced in, you know, and it can be over a while, but given a long enough time period it'll eventually get there. And then when we're talking about stuff, it's also based off of the average productivity. The average resident of San Francisco is maybe not as productive as a high, and like basically doesn't earn as high an income necessarily as a high income product worker. And so this means that if you are a higher than productive, higher than average productivity person, it's worth it to live in the expensive town because you're being paid more than the average productivity that's captured in rent, right? But if you're a low, if you're lower than average productivity, you flee high productive areas. You go to more marginal areas because those are the only places you can basically afford to make a living. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:40:06: Okay, that's very interesting. That's actually one of the questions I was really curious about. So I'm glad to hear an answer on that. Another one is, so the idea is, you know, land is soaking up the profits that capitalists and laborers are entitled to in the form of rent. But when I look at the wealthiest people in America, yeah, there's people who own a lot of land, but they bought that land after they became wealthy from doing things that were capital or labor, depending on how you define starting a company. Like sure, Bill Gates owns a lot of land in Montana or whatever, but like the reason he has all that wealth to begin with is because he started a company, you know, that's like basically labor or capital,however you define it? Right. So how do you explain the fact that all the wealthy people are, you know, capitalists or laborers? Lars Doucet - 00:40:47: Well, so the thing is, one of the big missed apprehensions people have is that, when they think of billionaires, they think of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, those are actually the minority billionaires, most billionaires or hedge funds are people involved in hedge funds. You know, bankers and what are bankers, most what are two thirds of banks? It's real estate, you know? And so, but more to your point, like if I, if it is like point that directly into it, it's like, I don't necessarily have a problem with the billionaire existing. You know what I mean? If someone like genuinely like bring something new into the world and like, you know, I don't necessarily buy the narrative that like billionaires are solely responsible for everything that comes out of their company, you know, I think they like to present that image. But I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. I have a problem with, you know, working class people not being able to feed their families, you know, and so like the greater issue is the fact that the rent is too high rather than that Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:41:45:No, no, I guess my point was in that, like, I'm not complaining that your solution would not fix the fact that billionaires are this. I also like that there's billionaires. What I'm pointing out is it's weird that, if you're theory of, like, where all the sort of plus in our society is getting, you know, given away is that it's going to landowners. And yet the most wealthy people in our society are not landowners. Doesn't that kind of contradict your theory? Lars Doucet - 00:42:11: Well, a lot of the wealthy people in our society are landowners, right? And it's just like, it's not the, so the, so the thing is is that basically making wealth off land is a way to make wealth without being productive, right? And so my point is is that, so like you said in your interview with Glazer that it's like, okay, the Googleplex, like the value of that real estate is probably not, you know, compared that to like the market cap of Google. But now compare the value of all the real estate in San Francisco to the market caps to some of those companies in there, you know, look at the people who are charging rent to people who work for Google. That's where the money's actually going, is that, and, and, you know, investors talk about this is that it's like, I have to, like, if you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line, right? You know, the money is going to basically upper middle class Americans and upper class Americans who own tons of residential land and are basically, and also the old and the wealthy, especially, are essentially this entire class of kind of hidden landed gentry that are extracting wealth from the most productive people in America and young people, especially. And, and it is creates really weird patterns, especially with like service workers who can't afford to live in the cities where their work is demanded. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:43:30: Yeah. Okay. So what do you think of this take? This might be economically efficient. In fact, I think it probably is economically efficient, but the effect of the land value tax would be to shift, to basically shift our sort of societal subsidy away from upper middle class people who own, happen to own land in urban areas and shift that to the super wealthy and also super productive people who will like control the half acre that Google owns and like mountain view. So it's kind of like a subsidy, not subsidy, but it's easing the burden on super productive companies like Google and so that they can make even cooler products in the future. But it is in some sense that's a little aggressive, you're going from upper middle class to like, you know, tech billionaire, right? But it's still be economically efficient to do that. Lars Doucet - 00:44:18: Well, no, I don't quite agree with that because it's like, although there are a lot of upper middle class Americans who own a lot of the land wealth, it's not the case that they own where the majority of the land wealth is. The majority of the land wealth in urban areas is actually in commercial real estate. Is the central business district, if you, and I work in mass appraisal, so I've seen this myself in the models we build is that if you look at the transactions in cities and then you plot where the land value is and like a graph, it looks like this. And this is the city center and that's not a residential district. So the residential districts are sucking up a lot of land value and the rent is toodamn high. But the central business district and this even holds even in the age of Zoom, it's taken a tumble, but it's starting from a very high level. That central residential, I'm not residential, but commercial real estate is super valuable. Like orders, like an order of magnitude more valuable than a lot of the other stuff. And a lot of it is very poorly used.In Houston especially, it's incredibly poorly used. We have all these central parking lots downtown. That is incredibly valuable real estate. And just a couple of speculators are just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. And that could be housing, that could be offices, that could be amenities, that could be a million sorts of things. And so when you're talking about a land value tax, those are the people who are going to get hit first. And those are people who are neither nice, nice, friendly upper middle class Americans, nor are they hardworking industrialists making cool stuff. They're people who are doing literally nothing. Now, if you do a full land value tax, yeah, it's going to shift the burden in society somewhat. But I feel that most analyses of property taxes and land value taxes that conclude that they are regressive, I think that's mostly done on the basis of our current assessments. And I feel like our assessments could be massively approved and that if we improve the assessments, we can show where most of our land values actually concentrated. And then we can make decisions about exactly, are we comfortable with these tax shifts? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:18: Yeah, yeah. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. If you are, I would really, really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it. Put the episode in a group chat you have with your friends, post it on Twitter, send it to somebody who think might like it. All of those things helps that a ton. Anyways, back to the conversation. So a while back I read this book, how Asia works. You know,Lars Doucet - 00:46:45: I'm a fan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:47: Yeah, and one of the things, I think Joseph Steadwell was going out there, what are the things he talks about is he's trying to explain why some Asian economies grew, gangbusters in the last 20th century. And one of the things he points to is that these economies implemented land reform were basically, I guess they were distributed land away from, I guess the existing aristocracy and gentry towards the people who are like working the land. And while I was reading the book at the time, I was kind of confused because, you know, we've like, there's something called like the Kostian. The Kostian, I forget the name of the argument. Basically, the idea is, regardless of who initially starts off with a resource, the incentive of that person will be to, for him to like give that resource, lend out that resource to be worked by that person who can make most productive use of it. And instead of what was pointing out that these like small, you know, like these peasant farmers basically, they will pay attention to detail of crop rotation and making the maximum use of this land to get like the maximum produce. Whereas if you're like a big landowner, you will just like try to do something mechanized. It's not nearly as effective. And in a poor country, what you have is a shitton of labor. So you want something that's like labor intensive. Anyways, backing up a bit, I was confused while I was reading the book because I was like, well, wouldn't the, wouldn't, what you would expect to happen in a market that basically the peasants get alone from the bank to work to, I guess, rent out that land. And then they are able to make that land work more productively than the original landowner. Therefore, they are able to like make a profit and everybody benefits basically. Why isn't there a co-scient solution to that? Lars Doucet - 00:48:24: Because any improvement that the peasants make to the land will be a signal to the landowner to increase the rent because of Ricardo's law of rent. Yep. And that's exactly what happened in Ireland when, and George talks about this in progress and poverty, is that a lot of people were like, why was there famine in Ireland? It's because the Irish are bad people. Why didn't they, they're lazy? Why didn't they improve? And it's like because if you improve the land, all that happens is you still are forced into one side of competition and the rent goes out. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:48:50: Yep. OK. That makes sense. Is the goal that the taxes you would collect with the land value tax? Are they meant to replace existing taxes or are they meant to give us more services like UBI? Because they probably can't do both, right? Like you either have to choose getting rid of existing taxes or getting more.. Lars Doucet - 00:49:08: Well, it depends how much UBI you want. You know what I mean? It's like you can, you know, it's a sliding skill. It's like how many taxes do you want to replace versus how much? Like, I mean, you can have a budget there. It's like if you can raise, you know, I show in the book the exact figures of how much I think land value tax could raise. And I forget the exact figures, but like you can pull up a graph and overlay it here of, you know, whether you're talking about the federal level or federal local and state, you know, there's $44 trillion of land value in America. And I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. And we would probably do less than that in practice. But even on the low end, I forget what figure I quote for the low end, like you could fully pay for any one of social security, Medicare plus Medicaid together, so the second one is healthcare or defense. Entirely with the lowest estimate of what I think land rents could raise. And then I think you can actually raise more than that because I think, and I give an argument in the book for why I think it's closer to like $4 trillion. And that could pay for all three and have room over for a little bit of extra. And so I mean, it's up to you, like, that's a policy decision of whether you want to spend it on spending, whether you want to spend it on offsetting taxes or whether you want to spend it on UBI. I think the best political solution, because like if I bite the bullet that there might be some regressivity issues left over, you want to do what's called a UBI or what, you know, in George's time was called a citizen's dividend, right? You know, this will smooth over any remaining regressivity issues. And then, but I very much am in favor of getting rid of some of these worst taxes, you know, not just because they have dead weight loss and land value tax doesn't, but also because there's this tantalizing theory called ATCORE- All taxes come out of rent, which suggests that if you reduce other taxes, it increases land values, which means that if it's true in the strongest sense, it means the single tax,right? Land value tax replaced all taxes would always work. And I'm not sure if I buy that, I want to see some empirical evidence, but I think at least some weak form of it holds, so that when you offset other worst taxes, not only do you get rid of the dead weight loss from those, but you also wind up raising at least a little bit more in land value tax revenue. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:51:20: Yes, yeah. I mean, as a libertarian, or I guess somebody who has like libertarian tendencies, my concern would basically be like, this obviously seems better than our current regime of taxing things that are good, basically capital income. But my concern is the way I'm guessing something like this would be implemented is it would be added on top of rather than repealing those taxes. And then, yeah, I guess like we would want to ensure. Lars Doucet - 00:51:44: I get this one a lot. Yeah, no. And so I have, you know, I've been a libertarian in my past, and I have a soft spot for libertarianism. I used to be a Ron Paul guy, I went back in the day for a hot minute. And so I think the thing to suede your concerns there is what is land value tax? It's property tax without a tax on buildings. Yep. So the natural path to actually getting land value tax comes from reforming existing property tax regimes by reducing an entire category of taxation, which is the tax on buildings. And so that's what I think is the most plausible way to get a land value tax, like in Texas here, if we were to start by just capture the same, like what I actually proposed for our first step is not 100% land value tax federally. I don't know, even know how you get to there. I think what you actually do is you start in places like Texas and like here, legalized split-rate property tax, thus, re-tax buildings and land at separate rates, set the rate on buildings to zero, collect the same dollar amount of taxes. Let's start there. There's proposals to do this in various cities around the nation right now. I think there's one in Virginia. There's a proposal to do in Detroit. I think there's some talk of it in Pennsylvania and some places. And I'd like to see those experiments run and observe what happens there. I think we should do it in Texas. And that would be something that I think would be very friendly to the libertarian mindset, because very clearly we're no new revenue, right? And we're exempting an entire category of taxation. Most people are gonna see savings on their tax bill and the people who own those parking lots downtown in Houston are gonna be paying most of the bill. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:53:14: Yeah, by the way, what do you make of, is there a good, Georgist's critique of government itself? In a sense that government is basically the original land squatter and it's basically charging the rest of us rents or staying on rent that. It's neither productively improving. As much as at least it's getting rents or must work. Like if you think about, even your landlord usually is not charging you 40%, which is what the income tax rate is in America, right? And it's like almost, you can view the land lord of America. Lars Doucet - 00:53:46: Well, I mean, it's like, I mean, if you wanna take the full, like if you're asking is Georgism compatible with full anarcho capitalist libertarianism, probably not 100%, I think we can have a little government as a treat. But I think it's not a coincidence that if you look throughout America's founding, I don't think it's a coincidence that originally, like people talk about it's like, oh, it used to be only white men who could vote. White land-owning men could vote. Like a government by the landowners for the landowners of the landowners, right? And that's very much kind of the traditional English system of government, just neo-feudalism, right? And so I think Georgism certainly has a critique of that, that it's like government is often instituted to protect the interests of landowners. But what's interesting is that if you look throughout history, I'm very much a fan of democracy, rule of the people. And it's like, I think we, you know, I kind of sympathize with Milton Friedman here, where he's like, you know, he might want to have less government than we have now, but he doesn't believe we can have no government. And then he goes on to endorse, you know, the land value taxes, the least worse tax, because income tax especially, I feel like is a gateway drug to the surveillance state, you know, one of the advantages of land value taxes you don't even care necessarily who owns the land. You're just like, hey, 4732 Apple Street, make sure the check shows up in the mail. I don't care how many shell companies in the Bahamas, you've like obscured your identity with, just put the check in the mail, Mr. Address, you know, whereas the income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country, and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich, and it's just this horrible burden we have, and then it'll, it gives the government this kind of presumed right to know what you're doing about everything you're doing in this massive invasion of privacy.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:55:42: Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I speak to you, I have shell companies in the Bahamas, by the way. Yes. There's an interesting speculation about what would happen if crypto really managed to divorce and private, I guess, make private your log of transactions or whatever. And then, I guess the idea is the only legible thing left to the government is land, right? So it would like force the government to institute a land value tax, because like you can't tax income or capital gains anymore, that's all on like the blockchain and the right, right? It's cured in some way. And yeah, yeah, so that, I mean, it's like crypto the gateway drug to George's own, because it'll just move income and capital to the other realm. Lars Doucet - 00:56:20: Yeah, it's just so weird. I've gone on record as being a pretty big crypto skeptic. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism home. I mean, not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book, who's a huge fan of Georgism home. It's like, I'll take fans from anywhere, even from people I've had sparring contests with. I'm generally pretty skeptical that crypto can fulfill all its promises. I am excited by those promises, and if they can prove me wrong, that would be great. And I think there's some logic to what you're saying is that if we literally couldn't track transactions, then I mean, I guess we don't have much the tracks accept land. I don't think that'll actually come to pass just based off of recent events. You know, and that's basically my position on it. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people, just they're some of the easiest people to convince about George's home, which was completely surprising to me. But I've learned a lot by talking to them. It's very interesting and weird. Yeah, yeah. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:57:16: So there was some other interesting questions from Twitter. Ramon Dario Iglesias asks, how do you transition from a world today where many Americans have homes where it really starts sparring to have homes to a world where, I mean, obviously, it would be like a different regime. They might still have homes, but who knows? Like, their property will be just be like, think I thought I'm going to complete a different way. How do you transition to that? Like, what would that transition look like for most Americans? Lars Doucet - 00

PURCHASE LAND IS A BIG DEAL: https://www.landisabigdeal.com/Subscribe to The Realignment to access our exclusive Q&A episodes and support the show: https://realignment.supercast.com/.REALIGNMENT NEWSLETTER: https://therealignment.substack.com/PURCHASE BOOKS AT OUR BOOKSHOP: https://bookshop.org/shop/therealignmentEmail us at: realignmentpod@gmail.comLars Doucet, author of Land is a Big Deal: Why rent is too High, Wages too Low, and What We Can do About It, joins The Realignment to argue that Georgism, the economic/political philosophy of Henry George, an often forgotten 19th-century thinker, is the best lens to analyze America's housing affordability and wage stagnation challenges.   

In this episode of Purpose-Driven Wealth, your host Mo Bina talks with Akhil Patel about the importance of an investor understanding his market cycles. Of course, markets have ups and downs. But if downs are overcome, how are there periods where it happens all over again? Here, Akhil simplifies how economic cycles repeat, the common theme with downturns, and his two cents on how relationships between nations impact the economy. In this episode you will learn: If we understand [economic problems], we can make better decisions around it Why are there cycles? The government has the tendency to spend too much on the wrong places No successive cycle looks like the one before Akhil Patel on the relationship between the US, China, and Russia and so much more! About Akhil Patel:   Akhil became interested in economic cycles during his school years when he came across Henry George's Progress and Poverty, which explained why economies go through periods of boom and bust.   Later on, he witnessed the negative effects of not understanding economic cycles when his family's business went through difficult periods during the major recessions in the early 1990s and during the global financial crisis after 2008.   He became determined to develop a body of work that would help people – whether they were investors, business owners, or those just interested in doing something with their savings to grow their wealth or manage their affairs through the course of these economic cycles.   Akhil has professional experience in audit, central government, and international banking and has worked on a range of issues, from reviewing large infrastructure public-private partnerships (PPP) deals to helping establish the UK's £3 billion International Climate Fund.   He has two Master's Degrees (in Finance and Public Policy) and a first degree in the Classics from Oxford. He is also currently a principal policy advisor to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).   Follow Akhil Patel on:   Website:          http://www.propertysharemarketeconomics.com/ Twitter:            https://twitter.com/AkhilGPatel   Connect with Mo Bina on:   Website:          https://www.high-risecapital.com/ Medium:          https://mobina.medium.com/   For more information on passive investing in commercial real estate, please check out our free eBook — More Doors, More Profits — by clicking here: https://www.high-risecapital.com/resources-index      

Henry George Gereis is the principal attorney at Gereis law. He is the son of Christian Egyptian immigrants.  Henry attended Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, where he ambitiously completed a joint three-year Juris Doctorate/ Masters in Dispute Resolution program, graduating in 2016 from the nation's #1 Masters in Dispute Resolution program. It was at Pepperdine that Henry mastered the interest-based, “below the line” approach to dispute resolution that is so valuable in negotiating excellent settlements for clients throughout his professional practice. Early in his career, Henry practiced Family Law, before transitioning to a practice that fulfilled his desire to serve indigent populations. Henry volunteered at the Santa Barbara Public Defenders Office, before accepting a Deputy Public Defender position at the Kern County Public Defender.  Gereis Law is the embodiment of “client-centered, caring counsel  ®; we treat every case like it's our closest family member's liberty that is at stake! We are committed to you, our client, above all else, at every stage of the litigation process. From our first encounter, you will leave with no doubt that we care deeply about your freedom, and we will fight to protect it!"  In this episode, we discuss: - Serving indigent populations and underserved communities. - Practicing what you're passionate about and turning that into what fulfills you. - Establishing a new, meaningful, and collaborative opportunity out of every negative experience. - Taking on fears to better serve the client and put them first over your own mental roadblocks.  Please let me know your thoughts!  Connect with Henry: Website: ​​https://gereislawfirm.com/  Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/gereis.law  Twitter: https://Twitter.com/gereisl  Featured Podcasts:  Love Thy Lawyer- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/love-thy-lawyer/id1515190796?i=1000542928723  Supreme Decisions-  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/supreme-decisions-legal-minute-podcast/id1454902170?i=1000548874763  Connect with Cindy Watson: Wesbite: https://watsonlabourlaw.com/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenonpurposecommunity/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/WomenOnPurpose1  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenonpurposecoaching/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCHOGOsk0bkijtwq8aRrtdA?view_as=subscriber  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices