Book Review: Progress and Poverty

When I read this book review by an at-the-time anonymous reviwer of Henry George's Progress and Poverty last year as part of Astral Codex Ten's Book Review Contest I thought it was intriguing. I don't know how much I agree with Georgism but I thought it had some interesting ideas. The part that really stuck out to me as potentially relevant to proof-of-stake blockchains is the way that landowners have an incentive to pursue extractive rather than constructive strategies:

Okay, but excluding evil Southern plantation owners, don't landlords deserve compensation for their work? What about Ms. Nguyen, the nice lady who manages your apartment block and went the extra mile for you when your A/C went out last summer?

I like Ms. Nguyen too, but let's contrast her with Mr. Slumlord, who owns the apartment block next door that's superficially identical, but who won't help you when your A/C goes out in the middle of summer.

Ms. Nguyen charges higher "rent" for her much better maintained units because part of that "rent" is actually her justly compensated wages for her labor in managing them, as well as interest from returns on the capital she's invested in their ongoing improvement and maintenance. She also collects a good bit of true Georgian rent because she is, after all, a landlord.

Mr. Slumlord puts in as little work as he can get away with and invests as little capital into maintenance as will keep the state off his back. His return is almost entirely rent. And the only reason he can charge rent in the first place is because of the valuable location – value the community produced, not him.

And that's the real injustice of land rent – the community produces the value, but the landlord charges rent to access it.

That struck me as similar to the phenomenon of "investors" running bid-bots to extract maximum passive income from their staked tokens while waiting for everyone else to somehow make the community successful. As I said at the beginning, I'm not sure I agree with Georgism, but I do wonder whether the power of staked tokens does work something like land, where the value can be much more influencing by your neighbors than by what you do with it, and whether the incentives in this token economy make sense.

There have been some follow-up posts by the same guest author who wrote the book review, but I'll confess that my eyes glazed over on reading them much more than the initial book review post.