Author: Henry GeorgePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
The Essence of Progress and Poverty
Author: Henry GeorgePublisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 048684207X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 83
Book Description
In this concise text, the distinguished American philosopher John Dewey compiled excerpts from the massive Progress and Poverty to provide those unfamiliar with Henry George's work with the essence of the author's thinking on economics. In his Foreword, Dewey noted, "It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato down rank with [George]. No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker." Fifteen brief chapters feature passages from George's highly influential book and examine why poverty persists throughout periods of economic and technological progress as well as the basis for economic cycles of boom and bust.
Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality
Author: Edward O'DonnellPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.
Poverty and Progress
Author: Stephan THERNSTROMPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674044312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
Embedded in the consciousness of Americans throughout much of the country's history has been the American Dream: that every citizen, no matter how humble his beginnings, is free to climb to the top of the social and economic ladder. Poverty and Progress assesses the claims of the American Dream against the actual structure of economic and social opportunities in a typical nineteenth century industrial community--Newburyport, Massachusetts. Here is local history. With the aid of newspapers, census reports, and local tax, school, and savings bank records Stephan Thernstrom constructs a detailed and vivid portrait of working class life in Newburyport from 1850 to 1880, the critical years in which this old New England town was transformed into a booming industrial city. To determine how many self-made men there really were in the community, he traces the career patterns of hundreds of obscure laborers and their sons over this thirty year period, exploring in depth the differing mobility patterns of native-born and Irish immigrant workmen. Out of this analysis emerges the conclusion that opportunities for occupational mobility were distinctly limited. Common laborers and their sons were rarely able to attain middle class status, although many rose from unskilled to semiskilled or skilled occupations. But another kind of mobility was widespread. Men who remained in lowly laboring jobs were often strikingly successful in accumulating savings and purchasing homes and a plot of land. As a result, the working class was more easily integrated into the community; a new basis for social stability was produced which offset the disruptive influences that accompanied the first shock of urbanization and industrialization. Since Newburyport underwent changes common to other American cities, Thernstrom argues, his findings help to illuminate the social history of nineteenth century America and provide a new point of departure for gauging mobility trends in our society today. Correlating the Newburyport evidence with comparable studies of twentieth century cities, he refutes the popular belief that it is now more difficult to rise from the bottom of the social ladder than it was in the idyllic past. The "blocked mobility" theory was proposed by Lloyd Warner in his famous "Yankee City" studies of Newburyport; Thernstrom provides a thorough critique of the "Yankee City" volumes and of the ahistorical style of social research which they embody.
The Annotated Works of Henry George
Author: Francis K. PeddlePublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479428
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume II of this series presents the unabridged text of Progress and Poverty, arguably the most influential work of Henry George. The original text is supplemented by notes which explain the changes George made during his lifetime and the many references he made to history, literature, economics, and public policy. A new index augments accessibility to the text and key terms. The introductory essay, “The Rhetoric and the Remedy,” by series co-editor William S. Peirce, provides an overview of the historical context for George’s philosophy of economics and summarizes the argument of Progress and Poverty within the framework of the economic theories of his day. It then looks at some of the early reactions by leading economists and opinion makers to George’s fervent and eloquent call for economic justice. Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty in order to identify and resolve the great paradox of modern industrial life. How was it possible for abject poverty, financial instability, and extreme economic inequality to co-exist with rising productivity and technological progress? He analyzed and rejected the widely held beliefs that poverty inevitably followed from the laws of economics or from a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. George concluded that at the heart of this dilemma was how society treated natural resources, especially urban land. He did not succumb to the panacea of arbitrarily confiscating property or taking from the rich to give to the poor. George argued that taxes on productive labor and capital should be drastically reduced. His “sovereign remedy” declared that public goods could be adequately funded from the returns to land and other natural resources. The activities of society as a whole give land its value. It is therefore both equitable and efficient for the community to tax or recapture land values to support the activities of government.
Author: Henry GeorgePoverty and Progress
Author: Deepak LalPublisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1938048857
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Book Description
In his new book, Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty, renowned development economist Deepak Lal draws on 50 years of experience around the globe to describe developing-country realities and rectify misguided notions about economic progress. Unique among books that have emerged in recent years on world poverty, Poverty and Progress directly confronts intellectual fads of the West and dismantles a wide range of myths that have obscured an astounding achievement: the unprecedented spread of economic progress around the world that is eliminating the scourge of mass poverty.
The Corruption of Economics
Author: Mason GaffneyPublisher: Georgist Paradigm
ISBN: 9780856832444
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Condemning the post-industrial economy to protracted periods of economic failure, this thought-provoking book documents how the integrity of economics as a discipline was deliberately compromised in the United States towards the end of the 19th century. Several chairs of economics were funded at leading universities to rebrand economics to justify unearned income. The tools for this strategy became neo-classical economics, and, unlike classical economists like Adam Smith who described wealth as the product of three factors--land, labor, and capital--the new theorists reduced these to two: labor and capital, thus treating land as capital. This concealed the benefits enjoyed by those in receipt of the rent from land. The effect, the authors reveal, was to deprive professional economists of the ability to diagnose problems, forecast important trends, and prescribe solutions.
Progress, Poverty and Exclusion
Author: Rosemary ThorpPublisher: IDB
ISBN: 9781886938359
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
A comprehensive Statistical Appendix provides regional and country-by-country data in such areas as GDP, manufacturing, sector productivity, prices, trade, income distribution and living standards."--BOOK JACKET.
Why Nations Fail
Author: Daron AcemogluPublisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307719227
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek
