Progress and Poverty

About this book

Why, asks Henry George, does poverty grow alongside progress? In the booming cities of nineteenth-century America, new railways, machines and industries had created vast wealth, yet wages stayed low and the poor grew poorer. His answer is land: as a community grows, the value of its land rises, and that unearned increase goes to landowners as rent, taking the gains of progress from labour and capital. His remedy was a single tax on the value of land, replacing all other taxes, so that the wealth created by the community would return to it.

Context and significance

George (1839–1897), a self-taught journalist in San Francisco, published the book in 1879, and it sold millions of copies, inspiring reformers around the world, from Tolstoy to Sun Yat-sen; a game invented to illustrate his ideas became the ancestor of Monopoly. Compare Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto.

About the author