Progress and Poverty

Progress and Poverty
Title page for Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (1881 edition)
AuthorHenry George
LanguageEnglish
SubjectsCapitalism, socialism, Georgism, tax policy, land, economic rent
Publication date
1879
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages406
ISBN1-59605-951-6
OCLC3051331
TextProgress and Poverty at Wikisource

Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy is an 1879 book by social theorist and economist Henry George. It is a treatise on the questions of why poverty accompanies economic and technological progress and why economies exhibit a tendency toward cyclical boom and bust. George uses history and deductive logic to argue for a radical solution focusing on the capture of economic rent from natural resource and land titles.

Progress and Poverty, George's first book, sold several million copies,[1] becoming one of the highest selling books of the late 1800s.[2][3] It helped spark the Progressive Era and a worldwide social reform movement around an ideology now known as Georgism. Jacob Riis, for example, explicitly marks the beginning of the Progressive Era awakening as 1879 because of the date of this publication.[4] The Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman wrote this about the influence of Progress and Poverty:

For some years prior to 1952 I was working on a history of American reform and over and over again my research ran into this fact: an enormous number of men and women, strikingly different people, men and women who were to lead 20th century America in a dozen fields of humane activity, wrote or told someone that their whole thinking had been redirected by reading Progress and Poverty in their formative years. In this respect no other book came anywhere near comparable influence.[5]

Progress and Poverty had perhaps even a larger impact around the world, in places such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, where George's influence was enormous.[6] Contemporary sources and historians claim that in the United Kingdom, a vast majority of both socialist and classical liberal activists could trace their ideological development to Henry George. George's popularity was more than a passing phase; even by 1906, a survey of British parliamentarians revealed that the American author's writing was more popular than Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, and William Shakespeare.[7] In 1933, John Dewey estimated that Progress and Poverty "had a wider distribution than almost all other books on political economy put together."[8]

  1. ^ "American History: Excerpt from Henry George Progress and Poverty 1879". University of Groningen. Retrieved 2021-07-02.
  2. ^ Hackett, Alice (1945). Fifty Years of Best Sellers, 1895 - 1945. R.R. Bowker Co.
  3. ^ Noble, Barnes &. "Progress and Poverty|Paperback". Barnes & Noble. Retrieved 2022-10-19.
  4. ^ Frederick, Peter (1976). Knights of the Golden Rule the Intellectual as Christian Social Reformer in the 1890s. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0813152313.
  5. ^ "Quotes: Notables on Henry George". Earth Rights Institute. Archived from the original on 2016-05-13. Retrieved 2014-12-05.
  6. ^ Boast, Richard (2008). Buying the land, selling the land : governments and Maori land in the North Island 1865–1921. Wellington N.Z.: Victoria University Press, Victoria University of Wellington. ISBN 9780864735614.
  7. ^ Rose, Jonathan (2010). The intellectual life of the British working classes. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300153651.
  8. ^ Dewey, John. "John Dewey's Foreword to Geiger's "The Philosophy of Henry George" (1933)". Retrieved 2 July 2015.