Does Georgism Work? Part 1: Is Land Really A Big Deal?

[Guest post by Lars Doucet - empirical follow-up to his Progress & Poverty review; scored on the same axes.] A rigorous, data-driven test of Krugman's dismissal that 'land just isn't a big deal today.' Marshals ~a dozen land-value estimation studies (Albouy, Larson 2015/2019, Smith's Counting Bounty, Tideman, Dwyer's Australian data, the Federal Reserve method, AEI) plus original Zillow/Redfin spot-checks to defend five hypotheses: most urban real-estate value is land; US land rents equal a sizable share of government spending (enough to cover any one of Defense / Social Security / Medicare+Medicaid alone, plausibly approaching a federal 'Single Tax'); land is a big share of bank loans, of gross personal assets (~40% US, 50-60% UK/France), and is concentrated among the old and wealthy. Intellectually honest - declares his pro-Georgist bias up front, brackets the estimates (Fed $24T low / Smith $44T high), and explains the methodology disputes (cost approach vs hedonic regression vs vacant-land sales). Introduces ATCOR and the Henry George Theorem. IMPACT: its 'land is a big deal' thesis became the title and core premise of Doucet's book and the founding mission of the Center for Land Economics.

Quality 80 · Excellent. Excellent band: an unusually lucid synthesis of a genuinely hard, data-heavy question that changes how a careful reader weighs land's economic importance, and the most substantial and consequential of the three follow-ups (also the most-read). A notch below the book review for narrower scope and drier specialist focus. ~80.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. Synthesizes pre-existing land-economics research (Albouy, Larson, Smith, Tideman, Dwyer) into an accessible empirical case rather than originating ideas. Its downstream impact is scored in A. ~50.

Real-world impact 4 · Moderate. The most substantial and most-read of the empirical Georgism follow-ups, marshaling ~a dozen land-value studies to defend land's economic importance — a specialist brief that bolstered the credibility of the Georgism case feeding the broader (materially-consequential) Georgist revival. Real significance via that role, but narrower direct reach than the flagship review — mid RWI.