Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth

Henry George

Mar 2022 · Chronicles Book 61 · LA CASE Books · AI-narrated by Mike (from Google)

About this audiobook

First published in 1879, “Progress and Poverty” is the ground-breaking treatise on the relationship between industrialization and poverty by Henry George, the American social theorist and economist. A huge commercial success when it was published and one of the best-selling books in America in the late 19th century, George’s work had a profound influence on economists, politicians, and social reformers all over the world. In “Progress and Poverty”, George attempted to understand why the technical and economic progress of the Industrial Age was so often accompanied by increases in poverty and human suffering. These “boom and bust” cycles in the economy had devastating impacts on countless numbers of people and George sought to find better solutions to these pressing problems. The solution that he proposed was radical at the time: a tax on land so that the value of private property could protect the most vulnerable from the fluctuations in the larger economy. Many of his ideas were instrumental to a new progressive social movement and have been adopted by several countries in the century since his work was first published

About the author

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.