Progress and Poverty was written by Henry George in 1879. The book is a treatise on the cyclical nature of an industrial economy and its remedies.

Progress and Poverty seeks to explain why poverty is virtually unknown in primitive societies but widespread wherever there is great wealth.

George saw how technological and social advances (including education and public services) increased the value of land (natural resources, urban locations, etc) and, thus, the amount of wealth that can be demanded by the owners of land from those who need the use of land. In other words: the better the public services, the higher the rent is (as more people value that land).

The tendency of speculators to increase the price of land faster than wealth can be produced to pay has the result of lowering the amount of wealth left over for labor to claim in wages, and finally leads to the collapse of enterprises at the margin, with a ripple effect that becomes a serious business depression entailing widespread unemployment, foreclosures, etc.

In Progress and Poverty, George examines various proposed strategies to prevent business depressions, unemployment and poverty, but finds them unsatisfactory. As an alternative he proposes his own solution: a single tax on land values. This would be a tax on the annual value of land held as private property.

It would be high enough to allow for all other taxes -- especially upon labor and production -- to be abolished. George argued that a land value tax would give landowners an incentive to use the land in a productive way, thereby employing labor and creating wealth, or to sell the land at affordable prices to those who would themselves use the land in a productive way. This shift in the bargaining balance between resource owners and laborers would raise the general level of wages and ensure no one need suffer involuntary poverty.

Soon after its publication, over three million copies of Progress and Poverty were bought. (Wikipedia.org)

Read Progress and Poverty by Henry George Online

INTRODUCTION
The Problem of Poverty Amid Progress
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw an enormous increase in the ability to produce wealth. Steam and electricity, mechanization, specialization, and new business methods greatly increased the power of labor.

Who could have foreseen the steamship, the railroad, the tractor? Or factories weaving cloth faster than hundreds of weavers? Who could have heard the throb of engines more powerful than all the beasts of burden combined? Or envisioned the immense effort saved by improvements in transportation, communication, and commerce?

Surely, these new powers would elevate society from its foundations, lifting the poorest above worry for the material needs of life. Imagine these new machines relieving human toil, muscles of iron making the poorest worker's life a holiday, giving our nobler impulses room to grow. Given such bountiful material conditions, surely we could anticipate the golden age long dreamed of. How could there be greed when everyone had enough? How could things that arise from poverty -- crime, ignorance, brutality -- exist when poverty had vanished? Such were the dreams born of this wonderful century of progress.

True, there were disappointments. Discovery upon discovery, invention after invention still did not lessen the toil of those who most need relief or bring plenty to the poor. But it seemed there were so many things that could be blamed for this failure that our faith has hardly weakened. Surely we would overcome these difficulties in time.

Yet we must now face facts we cannot mistake. All over the world, we hear complaints of industrial depression: labor condemned to involuntary idleness; capital going to waste; fear and hardship haunting workers. All this dull, deadening pain, this keen, maddening anguish, is summed up in the familiar phrase "hard times." ...

Read Progress and Poverty by Henry George Online

ABOUT HENRY GEORGE
Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "Single Tax" on land.

He inspired the philosophy and economic ideology known as Georgism, that holds that everyone owns what they create, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all humanity. His most famous work is Progress and Poverty written in 1879; it is a treatise on inequality, the cyclic nature of industrial economies and possible remedies

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