Progress and PovertyTo those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state, and would strive for its attainment.-Henry George, Progress and PovertyWhy do we have ups and downs in the national economy? Why does poverty continue to exist while a minute number of Americans enjoy a staggering increase in their personal wealth year after year? What went wrong in a country that professes to be dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal?As timely now as it was when it was written in 1871, Progress and Poverty is an honest and fascinating look at the financial order and the increasingly distorted distribution of income and wealth of life in America. George lays out simply and elegantly what the underlying problem is and how we might solve it.AUTHOR BIO: HENRY GEORGE (1839-1897) was a noted American economist and founder of the single-tax movement. He first outlined the doctrine in the pamphlet Our Land and Land Policy in 1871 and later wrote the more elaborate treatise Progress and Poverty (1879), which sold millions of copies all over the world. |
Contents
Correlation and Coordination of these Laws | 157 |
The Statics of the Problem thus explained | 158 |
OF WEALTH | 162 |
BOOK V | 187 |
BOOK VI | 212 |
BOOK VII | 236 |
BOOK VIII | 282 |
BOOK IX | 306 |
60 | |
67 | |
75 | |
Inferences from Analogy | 94 |
Disproof of the Malthusian Theory | 102 |
BOOK III | 110 |
Rent and the Law of Rent | 119 |
Of Interest and the cause of Interest | 124 |
Of spurious Capital and Profits often mistaken for Interest V The Law of Interest | 141 |
Wages and the Law of Wages | 147 |
Of the Effect upon Individuals and Classes | 316 |
BOOK X | 335 |
Differences in Civilisationto what | 345 |
How modern Civilisation may decline | 373 |
CONCLUSION | 393 |
60 | 401 |
? 8 67 75 94 the IIO 119 | 403 |
136 | 404 |
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Common terms and phrases
Adam Smith agricultural arise become cause chattel slavery civilisation classes common condition demand distribution of wealth doctrine drawn from capital duction effect employer England equal evident exchange exertion existing fact factors of production fixed force give greater Herbert Spencer human idea improvements increase of population increasing population India individual industry John Stuart Mill labour and capital land values landowners latifundia law of rent law of wages Malthus Malthusian theory margin of cultivation material progress merely monopoly natural necessary owner ownership paid placer mining plane possession poverty power of labour present private property produce of labour production of wealth productive power profits progressive countries property in land proportion recognised result secure slavery social society soil square mile subsistence taxation taxes tendency tends term things tion truth value of land wages and interest yield
Popular passages
Page 163 - Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, The young birds are chirping in the nest, The young fawns are playing with the shadows, The young flowers are blowing toward the west But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly ! They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.
Page 345 - Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion ; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity ; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.
Page 336 - Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like, sat'st brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine; what is low, raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
Page 103 - It is in vain to say that all mouths which the increase of mankind calls into existence bring with them hands. The new mouths require as much food as the old ones, and the hands do not produce as much.
Page 13 - So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Page 40 - Such cases, however, are not very frequent, and in every part of Europe, twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent...
Page 307 - And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
Page 12 - And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil.
Page 208 - My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep ; and my mother milked thirty kine.
Page 103 - ... existing habits of the people, under such an encouragement, it undoubtedly would, in little more than twenty years, what would then be their condition ? Unless the arts of production were in the same time improved in an almost unexampled degree, the inferior soils which must be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily remunerative cultivation which must be employed on the superior soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, would, by an insuperable necessity, render every...