“The hero turns out to be Henry George”

Ray Kroc’s first McDonalds in Des Plaines, IL, is now a historic site. Image credit: Matt Thorpe CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve complained before about Russ Roberts’ Econ Talk failing to note the importance of economic rent and land costs.  So I was pretty pleased to hear his guest Philip Auerswald say

I think the hero in all this, and I talk about this in The Code Economy, turns out to be Henry George. I mean, I think he really, you know, the 19th century U.S. economist–and he really anticipated these phenomena more clearly than anybody.

Pleased enough to read Auerswald’s new book. And he does get a lot of what George wrote about.

Auerswald’s main point seems to be that an economy doesn’t just have inputs and outputs, but what’s more important is the methods by which the inputs are used to produce the outputs. That’s “code,” and folks have been using it for 40,000 years.  In recent centuries, standardization and automation of various kinds have increased productivity — the amount of stuff which a given amount of inputs could produce.

And, as we see computers and machine-driven processes increasingly capable of replacing human labor, what will humans do?  He endorses Henry George’s analysis that, as productivity increases, rents will increase.  And he supports the citizens’ dividend (tho he does not use the term), to be funded by a land value tax.

But his concluding pages seem to assume that, of course everyone will have a guaranteed income from land rent, no problem there, but what will people do with their time? To George, the problem was to get a fair distribution (not redistribution, because by right the rent belongs to everybody) of wealth, which he expected would result, over time, in social progress and a more constructive community. When I look at Wikipedia, Flickr, some blogs and a bunch of other internet resources, I tend to agree with George. Auerswald assumes the wealth distribution, but doesn’t assume that people and the community will improve.  If I looked at Facebook or some other sites I might agree with him.

Auerswald also makes interesting use of the concept of comparative advantage, applying it to humans exchanging work with machines. Machines can do certain kinds of work millions of times faster than humans, so logically machines should do such work.  In other tasks the difference might be much less, so those tasks would remain with humans (tho I would guess at much lower wages than currently.) And then there are some “low-volume, high-price” tasks which might remain human monopolies.

*****If you’re not the editor of Auerswald’s book, stop reading here*****

This book is full of irritating errors.  On page 2 is a list of ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, comprising butter, sugar, water, salt, and chocolate chips — but no flour. Page 92 says “slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1807,” while Wikipedia provides various dates, depending on your definition, in the 1830s or 1840s. Page 120 places Ray Kroc’s first McDonalds in “Desplaines, California.”  Page 175 calls Zipcar a “ridesharing” platform, corrected on page 213 to “car-sharing.”   “As Henry George understood nearly a century ago” on page 232 doesn’t seem likely regarding a man who died in 1897 mentioned in a 2017 book. There are probably more, that historians or various kinds of geeks would notice.

 

More jobs –> less recidivism

Click this image of Abashiri Station, Hokkaido to learn how it relates to recidivism. Image credit: David McKelvey .license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Many of us have long assumed that a strong demand for labor results in less crime.  At least, less of the kind of crime people get imprisoned for.  And of course we assume this works most strongly for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, a category which includes most of those released after serving time in prison.

Now we have a study (or more precisely, a report on a study because the original source is behind a paywall) which confirms this assumption. Basically, those released into a strong economy are less likely to return to prison than those released in slack times.  Because the study was apparently done at the county level, there would be enough cases that it’s not a statistical artifact. From the abstract:

[B]eing released to a county with higher low-skilled wages significantly decreases the risk of recidivism. The impact of higher wages on recidivism is larger for both black offenders and first-time offenders, and in sectors that report being more willing to hire ex-offenders. These results are robust to individual- and county-level controls…

So, since taxing privilege rather than production is an economic development tool, we can also assert that it is an anti-crime measure.

Declining number of homeless Americans

Here’s another assertion that our “civilization” is collapsing.  Of course I don’t know that it’s collapsing, maybe it is, but I decided to arbitrarily pick one of the signs identified in the article:

The “misery index” mushrooms, witnessed by increasing rates of homicide, suicide, illness, homelessness, and drug/alcohol abuse;

I haven’t time to look up all of these, so I picked one  — homelessness. It happens that the Federal Dept of Housing & Urban Development, while not doing other mischief, runs an annual point-in-time survey of the number of homeless.  And look what it shows:

source: The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. (PIT=”point in time”)

Observed homelessness is declining. That doesn’t mean rent isn’t too high, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t imposing on friends or relatives for temporary shelter, it doesn’t mean that lots of folks don’t lack the opportunity to earn a decent living, and it doesn’t mean that people don’t hide from government officials.  But it does mean that one arbitrarily chosen statistic, used to support the ongoing collapse, doesn’t.

America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook and Cook County’s Treasurer

logo3No, they aren’t all one and the same.

I personally haven’t had any problem with JP Morgan Chase.  I had a CD with a predecessor bank and, when it matured, I retrieved it without difficulty. My real estate tax is paid thru them, and as far as I could tell my payments have been processed as intended.  Once upon a time I may have had a credit card with them.  But I long assumed JP Morgan Chase is a corrupt organization, because I seem to recall having read various things here and there, and, well, how could an honest bank become so large?

I hadn’t even thought about Morgan Chase’s role in the Madoff affair, but of course it was nontrivial, as documented by  Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gothoffer on their JP Madoff website (and, one presumes, in their book). They have compiled the information, most of which was floating around the Internet, that “In the past four years alone, JPMorgan Chase has paid out $28,902,150,000 in fines and settlements for fraudulent and illegal practices.”  And that, of course, is only the cases where they were caught and unable to avoid prosecution.

“Boycott JP Morgan Chase,” Chaitman and Gothoffer urge.  Great idea, and I have done so as best I can.  But I need to pay real estate tax, and as long as I live in Cook County it seems I must pay it to JP Morgan Chase.  So I wrote Maria Pappas, the County Treasurer, saying

I see from the check with which I paid my most recent real estate tax bill that you are still using JP Morgan Chase to process the County’s receipts. It’s pretty clear that JP Morgan Chase is a criminal enterprise, having paid over $28.9 billion in fines and settlements for fraudulent and illegal practices during the past four years. Why is the County unable to use any less dishonest bank to process payments? Thanks in advance for your response.

And just a couple of [business] days later, I received a response from “Customer Service Department:”

Thank you for contacting the Office of Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.

Cook County aims to provide efficient payment processing to the greatest number of taxpayers at the least cost to those taxpayers. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that additional considerations are relevant in the County’s choice of vendors, and we take your concern under advisement.

We hope this information is helpful and thank you for the opportunity to be of assistance.

So, they didn’t exactly say “we are going to boycott JP Morgan Chase because they’re crooks,” but it at least it appears that somebody read and understood my message.

My other recent check processed by JP Morgan Chase was used to pay Illinois State income tax. I suppose I should write somebody (Governor? Treasurer? Comptroller?) with a similar message, but I just assume that anyone responsible for administering a tax on earned income is already beyond hope. Maybe someone else will do it.

 

 

Progressive proposal from Kenya

detail from photo by Jennifer Wu via flickr (cc)
detail from photo by Jennifer Wu via flickr (cc)

Writing in Standard Digital, Charles Kanjama proposes that “If government was clever, it would include a value-capture approach in project financing.”  He’s writing about big infrastructure projects, which in his time (2014) and place (Kenya) include railway and port improvements. He suggests that perhaps half the cost should come from land value tax, without explaining why it would be appropriate for landowners to receive half the benefit of improvements paid for by the general community.  (Kanjama is an attorney and accountant who was rated among the top 100 legal minds in Kenya as well as one of the 100 most influential people in that country.)

The same edition (January 4 2014) carries another article showing a problem resulting from failure of the community to collect all the rent.  It seems that the government wanted to remove a large number of squatters who had settled in a protected forest.  Ordered to vacate, they each received 400,000 shillings ($4604.67 US, according to Wolfram Alpha) to purchase land elsewhere.  Now the time for relocation has expired, and many spent the money on things other than land.  Of course I don’t know these people, don’t know what land was available, don’t know their needs, but very clearly if land were nearly free (as results from a high land value tax) they would almost certainly be better off.

GMO crops don’t even increase yield

 

image credit: Stuart Williams via flickr (cc)
image credit: Stuart Williams via flickr (cc)

Here’s a program note from ABC indicating that yield of GMO crops is no greater than conventional crops.  Unfortunately there is no formal citation of the source article, nor is it available on line as far as I can tell, and ABC tends to remove their program notes after a few weeks.  However, the article, from the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, was written by Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, which might be enough information to locate it. Heinemann’s web page links to an article which may even be the one in question.

The taxing question of land value

1_69ffd9a3b25bee3673beaa1ee0190583UK Geoists are crowdsourcing a film about the nature and benefits resulting from a tax on the value of land.  You needn’t be a UK resident nor have a UK charge card in order to support this. Seeking a total of £9000, they’ve already got £2188 with 18 days to go.  Join the 46 funders so far, or find out more, here.

“We need an anti-Rentier Campaign” says Michael Lind

image credit: Erick_ckB via flickr (cc)
image credit: Erick_ckB via flickr (cc)

A nice series of three short articles (h/t Gloria Picchetti) in Salon by Michael Lind, explaining the difference between an entrepreneur — who may become wealthy by providing goods and services people want — and a rentier — who seeks to become rich by exacting a toll or tax on productive work.

Lind mentions, in a positive way, the land value tax, and also notes that this isn’t a left/right issue, as labor unions and professional associations can be just as monopolistic as bankers.  The negative effects of “intellectual” “property” are noted, altho Lind seems to think that those who profit from patents are “inventors.” Of course there’s no mention of Henry George, but maybe changing our name to “Institute for the Study and Extirpation of the Useless Rich” would be a helpful step.

Salon describes Michael Lind as author of Land of Promise, for which Amazon carries 15 reader reviews. Not all the reviews are positive, but the criticisms seem to focus on his style and attitude, nobody complaining that his analysis is flawed. Lind is also a “co-founder of the New America Foundation,” whose sources of funding are unclear to me but seem to include rentier George Soros.

The remedies Lind suggests are quite centralized, such as changing federal tax laws, and maintaining financial repression with the object of moving people from private savings to social programs.  Not what I would propose, but what does a geoist in flyover country have to contribute to this discussion?

 

Feeding a growing population on an earth that isn’t

image credit: Antwelm via flickr (cc)
image credit: Antwelm via flickr (cc)

Yesterday’s Guardian carried a very encouraging report from India, where rice farmers are multiplying their production figures by carefully and methodically managing their crops. This has nothing to do with genetic modification, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers, and no need for “protecting” “intellectual” “property.”  Of course it may require more labor per acre than other methods, but growing population means growing supply of labor.  And it may work best on relatively small, owner-operated farms.  The method, known as System of Root (or Rice) Intensification, can be applied to other crops.  It’s based on a French Jesuit’s observations of practices in Madagascar, promoted by Cornell’s International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.

The Guardian article asserts that Cornell’s work was funded by “an anonymous billionaire,” altho links from the Cornell site imply that “actor Jim Carrey” is somehow involved.   At this writing, there are 205 comments on the Guardian article, some of which are insightful.  One suggests that the reported results are quite exaggerated, but to read beyond the abstract of the source cited seems to cost $19.95.

I have no idea whether this particular method is as beneficial as described, but just last week I spoke to an Illinois farmer who reported that four adults were gainfully employed, supporting themselves, by intensively cultivating an acre of vegetables.  One way or another, people will find ways to coax more food from the earth, if they have a need (or desire) and are permitted to do so.

 

 

Another way to liberate books

empty card catalog
image credit: andresmh via flickr (cc)

While the logical way to make most books conveniently available to more people is to greatly reduce the scope and duration of the copy-prevention privilege known as “copyright,” another approach is to buy books their freedom, one-by-one. This seems to be the approach of Unglue.it.  They use a crowd-funding approach to pay privilege-holders for a creative-commons license, which essentially makes the book available to all if enough people are willing to donate enough money.  Certainly better than nothing and perhaps it will prove fruitful.

To date they seem to have ransomed three books in this way, tho their web site doesn’t tell us how much they paid, with four ongoing campaigns seeking to raise between $1,000 and $25,000.