I really really loved the Galen review. Not just for the content but the inventiveness of tackling such difficult material and situating it in the proper context. When that one came out of the gate first I knew the contest was loaded for bear.
Your review was my favorite by a large margin. It was an amazing idea in the first place, I thought: works from antiquity are not usually reviewed like a modern book might be, and I don't think bringing these two things together would ever have occurred to me.
It was also quite entertaining and humorous (heh heh), which — on top of its, uh, informativity; and the value gained merely from being such an intriguing concept; *and* from your excellent efforts to place it all in context (to steal a praise from lariusprime below) — made it an easy choice for me.
*******
I also greatly enjoyed the first-place winner; but, oddly, I thought #2 — that is, the "Down and Out" review — wasn't exceptional (though *was*, still, quite good: see below), so I'm kinda surprised by the consensus here... even my new idol, the author of the Galen review, thinks it was! Hm.
I do note that everyone seems to say the same thing: "it was entertaining and interesting", "it was a fun and easy read", etc.
I do absolutely agree with this; I had great fun reading it, probably top three in terms of fun alone; *buuut*: I might guess that many people (well... such as myself, in any case) enjoyed, most of all, the *excerpts from the original work* — which is indeed of surpassing interest and charm. However, the *review itself* (I thought) didn't add much beyond some comments along the lines of "huh, interesting, now look at this next anecdote I've pulled".
Might be a bit unfair; selecting good, representative excerpts is a skill too, after all, and it was written well, and choosing a good book is perhaps the element that can ultimately be of greatest service to the reader.
I suppose I'd sum it up like: reviews like that of *On the Natural Faculties*, or of *The Accidental Superpower*, or indeed the first-place winner, manage to add a good deal of insight and analysis along with the entertainment; I wasn't sure how much this should count vs "but all distinctions aside, how much did I like the experience of reading the review", but it looks like the general readership jumped the other way.
*******
Anyway, I am grateful to all who took the time to write a review, and congratulations indeed to all the winners, who undeniably wrote fantastic reviews by any standards. Cheers!
Throwing in my two cents worth - your Galen review was absorbing and very well written. As a plus, it was also one of the few reviews that I have found myself referring to in everyday conversation and therefore presumably relevant and memorable as well. Thanks, Zahn.
Yours was my favorite. Having been the first to be published, I had no idea what to expect the competition to be like. Then I read yours and decided there was no way I was winning.
Yours was my favorite for sheer skill of writing. You had me hooked right from the start on a topic I'm not particularly interested in - it's awe inspiring to write so well on such a topic. Congrats!
According to google, a typical edition of the original P&P clocks in at 406 pages, so just think about how much time you're saving!
Seriously though I am genuinely curious now that the results are in what people thought about length all around (for my review and the others). Every time I look back at the review now the little E.B. White on my shoulder is mumbling "omit words" over and over again, but I feel that way no matter what I write.
I thought your review was too long, but for me it got away with it by being very interesting. It's impossible for me to say whether your review could have been better if it was shorter, but I think writing a very long review is a high-risk strategy and I think in general reviewers should try to keep their word count way down below what yours ended up being.
On the one hand, I stopped reading one of the reviews part way through because it was too long; on the other hand, yours was my favourite and I think it might have been the longest(?). I'll leave it up to the economists to decide what that says about my revealed preferences. :P
I thought your review was perfectly fine as long as it was, but then I don't mind reading long texts, and even probably expect them to a bit better than short ones, all else being equal.
I really wanted to vote on the book review contest, but couldn't get through the Georgist review. It was good, but economics takes a lot of brainpower to digest. I got exhausted on my first attempt, picked it up again a few weeks later, and got exhausted again long before the end.
Seeing how scrupulous* some of you are, I wonder if one book review being much longer than the others affords it an unintuitive advantage -- anyone who finds it too long and boring and thus wouldn't vote for it, excludes themselves from voting because they didn't finish it, and thus feels it'd be unfair to vote because they didn't finish everything!
*I did read all the reviews, but my own conscience would be more than satisfied if I had merely skimmed a few, because I would take it as a sign that if the book review hadn't captivated me from the get-go to get me to not skim it, that would be a valid reason to judge it of lower quality. I would fully endorse taking such a view with my review --- if your eyes start to droop after a page or so it's already clear I've not written a great review in your eyes.
Well, that's a legitimate response. If you couldn't finish the review for whatever reason, you are not going to vote for it because you didn't find it appealing/convincing/interesting, and that's as good a reason as "I loved this one! Number One Vote all the way!"
Nobody, as lariusprime is pointing out, should feel bad about "everyone else loved this, I was a bad reader". Some of the reviews I was very "meh" about but I'm sure other people preferred them greatly. Any kind of a contest does involve some amount of subjectivity, and a contest such as this is going to include a lot of it, because "do I think this is a good review?" depends as much on "could I read it easily, did I have to force myself to finish it, do I hate the subject matter, did I think it was a terrible review of what was a good book" and so on?
I'm not surprised at all; when I saw that Scott made a 60% prediction that [redacted entry] won the contest, I was guessing that he was referring to yours. :) Congratulations on a fantastic review!
I really enjoyed your review, Eve. And since you linked to your dissertation, I enjoyed parts one and three of it. I'm afraid I couldn't follow the math in part two, which made me feel really stupid.
Awesome, super glad you enjoyed it! I'm not sure anyone in my dissertation committee fully followed the math! Part of that must be that I could have explained it better.
Couple of thoughts now that I'm processing the initial shock ---
- Scott rightly describes me as a "serious Georgist" but I'm hardly a scholar or anything (I don't even have a degree in econ).
- Anything insightful you found in my review is attributable either to George himself or many of far smarter people than myself that I consulted. I find Georgism convincing (obviously), but I'm also keen to make sure that I'm not just being taken in by a really persuasive argument.
- Ever since I wrote the review I've been doing my best to suss out to what extent Georgism has been tried in the last 140 years and what the empirical results are. Theory is great, but the question everyone really wants to know is if it *actually works* in the real world, what limitations does it run up against. Also in the best case that it works super great exactly as described, is it just one of those things that's totally politically unfeasible. All that stuff. To that end, would anyone be interested in reading a follow-up to the review that tries to seriously kick those tires and process the best available evidence? Perhaps styled in the "More Than You Wanted to Know" format, and then hoping I can live up to Scott's standards of rigor. I don't want to presume that Scott would subject you all to several thousand more unsolicited words from me, but perhaps it could find a place in a link roundup, or I could just link it in an open thread? Would anyone read this?
I would absolutely read that follow-up. Also, it was an excellent review, and the "By George" shtick was both entertaining and helped with the pacing of an extremely long (deservedly so) piece of writing. Congrats, good sir!
I'd be happy to help with this. I've never found Georgism particularly convincing. But I have extensive practical real estate experience at a professional level and know a lot about its history. And I've been working on the bones of an anti-Georgist FAQ or more than you want to know type piece. A lot of it focuses on Georgism... just not holding up empirically in my view.
What part would your practical experience play in a putative Anti-Georgist FAQ?
That is — is it mainly what lead you to look into and then object to Georgism? Or do you find actual examples of Georgist principles failing out there in the wild? Or have you had to look at a lot of studies that don't seem to bear Georgism out? Or...
Of course, if you'd prefer to say "just read my FAQ when it comes out so I don't repeat myself", well, that's fine (and what I'D do in your place, because I'm horribly lazy)... but I'm curious to hear more IF you have the time and inclination.
I think part of the potential trap may be the change in conditions since George's time. The crude model of his theory is "Here's an empty lot in the middle of the city. Instead of the owner holding on to it for the price to go up so he can sell it on, there should be a mechanism of punishing speculators such that it is more efficient and cheaper to do something with that land. Build a factory, so that the locals can have employment! Build an apartment block, so that they may have housing!"
The naive Georgist view would be that a big project like this in a working-class area was *precisely* what was needed to stimulate and provide employment and the downstream effects of that on the local economy (I don't think the boasting in the linked article that "they're coming to NY anyway now and they're setting up in Manhattan" is as good as it sounds and is not the victory AOC is making it out to be - it's great for Manhattan but what about Queens?)
But the *practical* effect was that this was perceived as demanding too many concessions and money from the city administration. The opposition to it would rather the site continue to sit empty. What has Georgism to say about that perverse incentive?
So in our new era, suppose an empty lot is Georgist land taxed to make the owners build upon it, or sell to someone who will build on it. Okay. Now the owners/investors/speculators slap up a block of luxury apartments. Costs $9,000 a month to rent, $20,000,000 to buy outright. Locals can't afford that, so you need outsiders to move in. Well, not your fault if most of the units are empty, now is it? Or that those purchasers are foreign investors? Is Georgism going to *force* you to rent out your apartments, how can it do that? Is it going to say "you have to build *affordable* apartments" and if it does, then it is going far beyond a simple land tax. You wanted us to build on the empty lot, we've done so, that it in the end still benefits speculators is not our fault.
I think motivated parties will find loopholes faster than the theory can pivot, and that updating to new conditions (employment is now office buildings for marketing and sales teams for multinationals, not Smith & Co. Pushpin Manufacturers) will mean a lot of changes to the base notion.
Building unproductively doesn't let you dodge LVT.
You still have to pay LVT no matter what's on the land, and the only way to make it worth paying is to use the land in a way that earns more than LVT costs, which empty luxury flats wouldn't.
My reservation about Georgism is the same one I have about communism: looks great on paper, but in practice it probably relies too much on the ability to foresee and predict how human beings respond to incentives *and* it assumes too great a degree of homogeneity in human values and interests.
It human beings were programmable robots, Georgism would probably work great -- but so would communism, and for that matter any number of the social engineering schemes that already turn the tax code into a massive 10,000 page compedium.
I have no particular attachment to Georgism, other than an interested spectator. But it seems to me that we've gotten reasonably good at appraising the value of things, at least within an acceptable error margin, that it should be possible to at least ascertain what the rent value of the land is.
The first two. I'm not really a theoretician but Georgism doesn't seem to conform with my actual observed and studied reality. I know about real estate not out of some theoretical interest but because I do a fair bit of work in it.
As a complete amateur, reading this bit from the entry in Wikipedia:
" A land value tax, charging fees for exclusive use of land, as a means of raising public revenue is also a progressive tax tending to reduce economic inequality, since it applies entirely to ownership of valuable land, which is correlated with income, and there is generally no means by which landlords can shift the tax burden onto tenants or laborers. Landlords are unable to pass the tax on to tenants because the supply and demand of rented land is unchanged. Because the supply of land is perfectly inelastic, land rents depend on what tenants are prepared to pay, rather than on the expenses of landlords, and so the tax cannot be passed on to tenants."
Dude. Landlords can *always* find a way to pass the tax on to tenants. Put a land value tax on to whatever property they own, and they'll use some reason to pass that on to the tenant because their idea is "this is my property, I am renting it to make a profit, it is unfair to tax me, if I have to pay extra for the value then this means the rent needs to be higher because I am giving tenants a more valuable place to live".
There are terrible tenants out there but there are also terrible landlords, and if people are desperate enough to live someplace, they will pay 'under the counter' to live somewhere. "What, me a landlord? No, no, these sixteen people living here are all family members and friends and are certainly not paying me rent!" https://sylvieons.tumblr.com/post/656293788560572416
This is a very simplistic analysis. If all landlords coordinated to simultaneously raise prices they could. This type of coordination is illegal for precisely that reason. But tax increases don't require illegal or formal coordination: everyone knows they're coming so everyone can raise prices simultaneously.
Landlords would only bear the majority of the increase of a tax increase if land had an extremely high elasticity of demand. In other words, that raising price would cause people to consume less of it rather than pay more. In that case, landlords would be forced to not raise prices because their customers would leave and would have to eat the costs. But demand for housing is very inelastic. Famously so. Thus they can raise the prices and their tenants cannot exit the market all that easily.
Landlords compete with other landlords, that's why they don't raise rent. (Also, there are often regulations limiting the ability of landlords to up rent, especially during a tenancy.) But if a tax increase is coming, it seems reasonable to expect all landlords to up prices accordingly in order to maintain the profit margin that they're used to - if they don't pass on the cost, and all other factors remain the same, they will lose money and go out of business.
I admit that "all other factors remain the same" is where a Georgist would disagree - LVT makes properties less valuable by imposing an additional cost on ownership. However, I'll point out that many rental properties are mortgaged (or recently built with construction costs to recoup), and mortgages are based on purchase price and not on current price, so even if the property becomes worthless the landlord still owes the bank the exact same amount.
Given that landlords will hate an LVT, I imagine them to all publicly announce that they'll up rents if it gets passed, so it's not hard for them to all do it simultaneously.
Kinda like an adversarial collaboration? Sure, I'm down. To be clear in terms of format I think it'd be best for us to just each write our own pieces that stand alone and don't try to reach consensus for its own sake, but some of the research material I am explicitly looking for is the best arguments and evidence against Georgism, so if you can provide me with some of those that'd be swell.
What might be especially valuable, if you two both have the time and compatibility, would be a section describing the most relevant cases and the listing the best evidence about them that you have consensus on. Half of the challenge in reading a research piece like you (and he) are considering is that it's impossible to tell if the facts are getting cherry-picked (often entirely inadvertently by the author; they almost unavoidably apply an intuition of significance a reliability in line with their worldview.)
I wouldn't expect consensus on the analysis and conclusions to be doable, but consensus on the relevant set of facts and evidence might be possible.
This is a great point. I'd like to source critiques from this community specifically as its my target audience, and make sure every major concern or confusion someone brings up gets addressed.
That's fine. I suspect what I have that you don't is a thorough knowledge of the history of land ownership and taxes in a wide variety of settings including modern day America. I suspect what you have that I don't is a deeper knowledge of Georgist thought, especially modern Georgist thought.
Yeah I look forward to hearing what you have to say. It feels like cheating for me to just address theoretical objections, and all I really care about here is finding the truth, whatever that is (or the best approximation we're able to suss out). I've recently attracted a bunch of Georgists who have waaay better credentials and experience than me, so I hope you don't mind if I lean on them to get answers and evidence to address your critiques.
This is gonna take me a while, and I'm not interested in trying to score cheap points on you; what I envision is whenever you have some things to say (either in a publication or a comment or anything) I'll go do my research and let you know what I've found whenever I can, so if you have a reply to that in turn I'll try to follow up on that before I publish a final draft.
All subject to not writing *another* 15,000 word monstrosity, but you know, erring on the side of being thorough and fair and not exhausting my interlocutors. I'm not interested in shoveling out a Gish gallop.
To me, Georgism seems like a great idea with massive vested interests opposing it ever being implemented. It wouldn't be that difficult to rally public opposition, anything that increases the cost of living while simultaneously lowering house prices is not going to go down well with the general public. I'm not denying the benefits, but immediate increases in the cost of housing are inevitable for both owners and tenants.
Other than the political implausibility of it, the main practical difficulty is working out how much the Land Value Tax should be. However, it doesn't have to be perfect in order to work, and it could be phased in gradually to give us time to work out all of the problems. If it replaced another tax (like sales tax/VAT or income tax) it would probably be quite popular, since most people would end up paying less tax. I just don't think enough people understand Georgism to be sold on the idea that 0.1% of tax revenue will be experimentally shifted into a LVT.
It does sound like a great theory, but could it work? Does it work? Has it been tried? is exactly what I'd like to have a follow-up on.
I don't think people are necessarily very worried about the value of their houses falling, except that if they're paying a mortage for $X00,000 and now under the new Georgist land tax their house is worth $Y00,000 which is a lesser amount, they've been stuck with an extra expense. But a Georgist land tax on top of all the other local and government taxes might be a step too far. As you say, if it replaced VAT or something, it would be an easier sell. But if, as far as ordinary people were concerned, "this is another new tax on top of rates, water bills, sales tax, etc." then it's not going to be perceived favourably.
And honestly? I do think big developers and investors and so forth could find some wiggle-room, some loop-hole, around it to benefit. That's why there are tax lawyers and accountants, after all, finding ways that the really deep pockets don't have to pay as much taxes as the technical legal amount says, in perfectly legal tax limitation. I could see Ordinary Citizen Jones being in the position attributed to Warren Buffet: "I pay less tax than my secretary does".
One advantage of the tax is that there are fewer ways to wriggle out of it, because you can't exactly hide land. You can hide that you own it of course, but I assume that if you don't pay up the government will eventually just seize the asset and sell it to cover the unpaid tax.
There's obviously potential for corruption if you can convince the assessors to tax your land at less than its worth, but I think making this information publicly available could help with that - if the city centre has lower tax rates than the suburbs, people in the suburbs will demand an explanation. There's probably going to be some sneaky backheeling to value land less than it should be, but its hard to imagine it being more perverse than the existing system for personal and corporate tax.
I think the real way to assess this is to acknowledge that literally all systems are gamed for and by the rich, and the real test is not whether a proposed system *can* be gamed (because it certainly will be), but *how much*, and is that more or less than the status quo.
I'll try to make this part of my analysis in a follow up but I might need some help as it feels pretty squishy to grasp once you go beyond theory and into empirics.
"literally all systems are gamed for and by the rich"
Yeah, that's my view too. My concerns around a lovely theoretical model of a land tax is that somebody who can afford to buy a lot or property on a prime location in a big city that is worth tens of millions is going to have much less trouble finding a way around said tax than an ordinary person who inherited Granny's house when she popped her clogs and that house has now increased hugely in value, so said ordinary citizen gets hit with "congratulations on your inheritance, now you have to do something useful with it within thirty days or we're hammering you with punitive taxes on top of the death duties/inheritance tax and paying for Granny's funeral that you're already stuck with".
I definitely agree with that assessment, that's why I immediately try to think of ways to abuse any proposed system for personal gain! It's going to depend on the exact details, but my impression is that LVT would be very easy to game a little bit (since reasonable people could disagree on the assessment of land value), but difficult to completely evade.
Let me introduce you to Prop 13 in California. I pay about half the real estate taxes as my neighbor to my left, who bought 5 years later than me, in a real estate boom, but about twice the real estate taxes as my neighbor to the right, who bought 5 years before me in a real estate bust.
The issue is not the amount of land, the issue is *who* decides the value of the land, and on what basis? The latter has *always* been an incredible nest of corrupt snakes.
In-practice, most property owners are already paying a property tax already. I think it will just go from Rate * (value of land + value of improvements) to Rate * (rent value of land).
For most people, numbers will remain roughly the same.
I would love to hear more, I assume a few economists have had some thoughts since George and hearing more about the history of the idea would be great.
Definitely "it was tried here, eighteen months later half the population had been eaten by dragons and the inner city was now a portal to Hell (so no major change there)" coverage would be great.
Scott, I think granting the winner a second guest post that is a continuation only seems like a small favor to grant! (unless of course of course prominently linking to the author’s blog that has it is an even nicer favor)
Yes please, I think your review has made me a Georgist, so now I'd like to hear all the counterarguments and occasions on which it's been tried and failed. It seems like an obvious good idea, but so did socialism.
I'm in the same camp myself. I'd like it to be true, which means I really owe it to myself to go out and see if I can find evidence that it actually is.
What we need is to go out and see if we can find evidence that it's false. I've fallen for this sort of thing before, and evidence that it's true will be thick on the ground and easy to come by, independent of whether it's true or false.
Evidence that it's false will be hard to come by, and will somehow magically slide off our minds.
I stayed Marxist (my childhood faith) for a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took an evening in the pub with a Cambridge economic history don who specialized in Russia countering my every argument for me to begin to see the problems with it. An unbiased mind wouldn't have given Communism the time of day after about 1950 I would think.
What you need to do is to write a vicious anti-Georgist diatribe, pull out all the stops to discredit it as far as you can in your own mind. Live all the arguments against it and make them your own. Take all the arguments for it and show why they don't work.
Find all the evil weasels who are working for the Devil and raising trivial objections to Georgism out of their own self-interest and work out how to make their arguments better and more damning.
It's hard and it hurts, and at the end you'll be able to convince most anyone of either position, but you won't hold either position yourself any more and a piece of your identity will have gone missing and all your former friends will think you're a traitor.
Yes, which is why I've been openly soliciting everyone's best contrary arguments here and elsewhere -- sorry if my shorthand "evidence that it's true" implied I was supporting verificationism rather than falsificationism for this particular project. Whether I live up to the task I'll leave the community's judgment.
I enjoyed pretty much all of these, but my two personal favorites were "On the Natural Faculties" and "Down and Out in Paris and London", and it looks like I wasn't alone in this judgment!
Well done everyone. Thanks so much for all the time you spent writing these. I read every one of the main ones and a lot of the ones from the community pile.
"Since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value!"
Well Actually, thanks to present value discounting, it really isn't - let's see, assuming a 1% annual interest rate, the value would be $119.95 per year, and dividing by .01 for the perpetuity gives $11,995 total. Assuming you're immortal, that's quite a bit more than the monetary prizes, but it's not nearly infinite!
Since the prize is being paid out in subscriptions and not in cash, that would only increase the value! I have no time for searching out actual inflation rates, but if subscription price adjustments are matching or outpacing interest, *then* the value of this prize will truly be infinite
Assuming you know how present value discounting works (if not I can elaborate), it's because I assumed 1% interest for the sake of the toy example, so the PVs of the annualized payments form an infinite geometric series which converges to 119.95/(1-.99)
Morbid caveat: I think it's reasonable to argue that a subscription loses all value if nothing is being produced, so technically we should consult an actuarial table and estimate Scott's annual risk of death, unless we're being very optimistic about the life extension stuff.
Scott's existence proves that bloggers as good as he is are possible. The odds are that he has decades to find a successor. That's how I conceive of it.
If a subscription to A 10 costs $10/month, assuming no inflation and that AC10 goes on forever, the value of an infinity subscription to AC10 would be equal to the value of a risk-free dollar denominates security that pays dividends equal to $10/month.
I wrote one of the runners-up (about bears) and am super-impressed with the quality and variety of reviews that people put together for this contest. They show what a huge and curious readership SSC and ACX have enjoyed, and provide lots of food for thought. (NB: probably better in most respects for your community than providing food for bears, according to the book I reviewed.)
If I remember correctly, the contest generated an order of magnitude or so more entrants than Scott first expected.
Congratulations to the winners and runners-up, and to Scott for inspiring so many people to participate in this.
Thanks so much to everyone who voted and wrote reviews. Just getting promoted to finalist by readers really meant a lot, especially after looking at the other reviews and seeing how rigorous and well-written a lot of them were. The results couldn't have me happier, as the 'Progress and Poverty and 'On the Natural Faculties' reviews were definitely my favorites of the bunch.
I've just started a blog where I plan to review more books and hopefully do longer write-ups on LW and ACX adjacent topics. In my most recent post, https://whimsi.substack.com/p/responding-to-comments-on-down-and I respond to some of the comments on the Orwell review and try to flesh out a couple of ideas I only gestured at. Forgive me if I'm rough in places, as that Orwell review is the first long-form piece I've ever published online. Still very much trying to figure out tone, topics, etc.
So once again, thanks a lot to Scott and everyone that participated! I'm a long-time reader of the blog, and to see that people in this community enjoy my writing means more than I can put into words in a single comment.
Congratulations to the finalists! This contest was a delight. A special shout out to Solenoid Entity who recorded an audiobook worth of podcasts to help folks like myself consume it all.
Is that the wonderful person who does the SSC podcast recordings? I was pretty shocked at the quality and consistency of the readings, especially with dense material. Solenoid: I sincerely apologise for every time I made you say <link in post>!
I thought all of the reviews were good, and most were excellent; but, just in case the authors look through these comments, I wanted to express extra appreciation for:
-- Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell (not as deeply philosophical as I expected but also much more pleasant and fun than I expected)
-- Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj (didn't agree with a good chunk of the reviewer's ideas, but made me think and I am by no means sure I'm right and she's wrong)
--Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell (fascinating subject, good book, great review)
--Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck (I had some criticism about this one but can no longer remember it, while I do still remember that it was very interesting and enjoyable)
--The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by John B (really impressed by the thoroughness and skill of the reviewer; I wouldn't be surprised if I got more out of this review than from the book itself; but the book is also a very interesting one as well)
*******
Thanks to all the reviewers and congratulations to all finalists and winners! Also: please note, if you didn't make it into the "finalists", well, I read a couple in there I thought were easily good enough to make it in and have a decent chance of coming out a winner. I wish we could have had more than one "community choice" review!
Reviewer of The Accidental Superpower here. Thanks for the kind words — and for the many thoughtful comments people left at the review itself; the main reason I wrote was to have people poke holes in Zeihan’s model that weren’t obvious to me, and think that many commenters lived up to that expectation.
No worries — thanks for the review itself! (In another, earlier comment I made, somewhere below, I mention "the *The Accidental Superpower* review" as absolutely deserving a top 3 spot, and I stand by that; still, I'm glad if was at least featured on the blog, especially if you got what you wanted from the comments.)
Yay! My favourite one won! Sorry to see Addiction by Design and The Collapse of Complex Societies didn't make it into the top 3. I loved those ones too.
What I _really_ want to know, though, is whether Scott was correct in his very confident prediction that [redacted] would win the book review contest! I was amazed to see it at the time, that he was willing to put 60% probability on just one out of 17 finalists. Does he really know us that well? Also, I expect he won't tell us, but I'd love to know how close it was, even just in qualitative terms.
Scott hand-chose the finalists readers could choose from, but the reader’s choice award was where readers could choose among - all - contestants, not just the Scott-picked shortlist.
> I asked you all to vote on entries from the Runners-Up Packet to promote to finalists. There were three clear winners - the two reviews I posted last week, and a review contrasting Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations with Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia. I've already posted a Zeihan review, and I worry readers are getting tired of these reviews and don't have the patience for a semi-duplicate, so I'm awarding the new Zeihan review...some prize to be determined later, like "People's Choice" or something, that doesn't involve me making it a finalist. Don't worry, there will be money involved. If you want to read it, you can find it here as "Disunited Nations (2020) vs. Dawn of Eurasia (2017)"
I'd like to second that. Scott has the dual task of being an influential writer, for which he is justifiably lauded, and the task of being a decent human being who puts in hours of work into supporting others, which is largely thankless work.
I'd be curious to see more detail about the voting results - even just a rank order of number of votes each received would be interesting (even though I think there's a decent chance I got the fewest), but also correlations between them. I understand if that kind of thing feels bad to share though.
I don't think I received an email about my subscription. I was already a subscriber, so maybe that's expected?
Could we collect all the other reviews on another site?
During the downtime of SSC, I floated the idea that those of us who wanted to keep the tradition of SSC alive could start a group blog, practicing epistemic charity, and trying to contribute similarly long and thoughtful essays. Or essais.
I still think that such a blog - with Scott's blessing, of course - might be an interesting experiment. And starting with all these reviews from people who are clearly SSC/ACX readers would be fascinating.
This contest was amazing! Really glad my preferred ones ended up winning, and even more that you decided to quintiple their winnings! What an awesome gesture 🙂
Is anyone else kind of disappointed that while Scott massively increased the prizes, he didn't expand the number of prize-winning reviews? Both Scott and the commenters liked to emphasize that many of the reviews were very good, but now the implication is that the three winners were many leagues above the others, which I don't really feel to be the case... It would be interesting to see what the final tally of votes was, and how many points Scott himself awarded to each of the finalists.
Given that $10,000 ended up being given away as prizes, awarding e.g. $250 for 4th and 5th place, and $100 each for places 6-10, wouldn't impact the top 3 prizes very much, but it would motivate more readers to compete in the future. Writing a book review feels rather Sisyphean if only about 3% of entries actually get a cash prize; in the last adversarial collaboration, for comparison, 25% of entries ended up getting a prize. An ACX subscription is great too, but I'm not sure how many people would be willing to go through the trouble of writing a lengthy review, when the only prize they could realistically hope for was a free subscription.
(Disclaimer: I wrote one of the runners-up, so take everything above with a pinch of salt.)
I think I'm a pretty good writer and a damned smart fellow, but I am often puzzled by what gets popular and what doesn't — even my top research/review posts on Reddit aren't the ones I personally think are best! — so I have no confidence that I'd be in that 3%; but top fourth? Maybe worth a try.
What review was yours, out of curiosity? I voted for a couple runners-up that I thought were easily good enough to have been finalists.
I have a pet theory that game designers are an underappreciated resource in today’s society, because they’re taught to think very deeply about human systems and how those systems might affect people’s behaviour in both expected and unexpected ways. They’ve probably spent more time theorizing about, and more importantly *experimenting with*, human systems, than almost any other profession. (Though as a hobbyist game designer myself I may be biased.)
All this to say: congrats Lars, and don’t sell yourself short. You may well have been the perfect person to analyze and summarize Georgism for this blog’s readers, because ultimately Georgism is nothing more than a proposal to change the rules of the IRL games that we play. A follow-up post would be more than welcome.
I appreciate the comments, though I don't wanna get TOO high on my own supply :).
Having worked in educational games at the start of my career, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the subject and reasons to be humble. To make my background clear, I did my Master's thesis on Ian Bogost's theory of "procedural rhetoric", with an accompanying game as my exemplar, "Super Energy Apocalypse", a game about sustainable energy use and zombies, with numbers based on real world research (though I kind of cringe at the rigor looking back now).
Sadly it was flash based, so you'll have to dig deep to get it to work today:
I'm not an explicit Marxist like he is, but apart from that he's totally on the money.
In short, systems thinking is crucial, but it also allows you to prove literally anything you want because the map is not the territory, and it's very easy for gamedevs like myself to think we're smarter than we actually are, and overestimate the power of systems and underestimate our bias in tinkering them (is the system outputting something you didn't expect because of a bug or because your ideas are wrong? How do you know? If it outputs stuff in agreement with your views but it's only because of a bug, will you know to notice? Will you be motivated to 'fix' it?)
I think the best insight from the article above is the section on the Landlord's game, to bring things back in a beautiful full Georgist circle. Elizabeth Maggie isn't to be celebrated simply for being a pioneer of "procedural rhetoric" marrying game design and pedagogy, but ALSO because she had the insight to suggest that players consider two different kinds of rulesets. IE, to encourage the players to deliberately envision a different world and to envision the consequences of changing the rules themselves, rather than just set up a toy model that always outputs a predefined conclusion.
All that said, one of the background facts that led to my eventual land-pilling is the fact that one of my favorite childhood games was the SNES edition of SimCity, and no matter how hard I tried, there was always ONE citizen complaint that always seemed to stick around as #1 no matter what I did:
"Housing costs are too high!"
(WTF? But I did everything "right!" I improved all the land values!)
The most striking part of the experience for me (Humankind reviewer) was that within a couple of hours of the review going up, I'd learnt far more about the subject from reading the comments, than I had from hours of reading the book. Feedback from this community is startlingly insightful.
I also really enjoyed Why Children Fail. I feel like I heard many of those ideas floating around, but this review made a good case for them in a way that swayed me for the first time.
> All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value!
But in this case we actually do know that Scott Alexander won't live forever. Unless he knows something we don't know?! (but even then, contest winners will die off instead)
I'm not sure if that works when there's no equivalent to a dislike/downvote. Hard to tell a controversial review from one which merely didn't interest many people.
I really really loved the Galen review. Not just for the content but the inventiveness of tackling such difficult material and situating it in the proper context. When that one came out of the gate first I knew the contest was loaded for bear.
Your review was my favorite by a large margin. It was an amazing idea in the first place, I thought: works from antiquity are not usually reviewed like a modern book might be, and I don't think bringing these two things together would ever have occurred to me.
It was also quite entertaining and humorous (heh heh), which — on top of its, uh, informativity; and the value gained merely from being such an intriguing concept; *and* from your excellent efforts to place it all in context (to steal a praise from lariusprime below) — made it an easy choice for me.
*******
I also greatly enjoyed the first-place winner; but, oddly, I thought #2 — that is, the "Down and Out" review — wasn't exceptional (though *was*, still, quite good: see below), so I'm kinda surprised by the consensus here... even my new idol, the author of the Galen review, thinks it was! Hm.
I do note that everyone seems to say the same thing: "it was entertaining and interesting", "it was a fun and easy read", etc.
I do absolutely agree with this; I had great fun reading it, probably top three in terms of fun alone; *buuut*: I might guess that many people (well... such as myself, in any case) enjoyed, most of all, the *excerpts from the original work* — which is indeed of surpassing interest and charm. However, the *review itself* (I thought) didn't add much beyond some comments along the lines of "huh, interesting, now look at this next anecdote I've pulled".
Might be a bit unfair; selecting good, representative excerpts is a skill too, after all, and it was written well, and choosing a good book is perhaps the element that can ultimately be of greatest service to the reader.
I suppose I'd sum it up like: reviews like that of *On the Natural Faculties*, or of *The Accidental Superpower*, or indeed the first-place winner, manage to add a good deal of insight and analysis along with the entertainment; I wasn't sure how much this should count vs "but all distinctions aside, how much did I like the experience of reading the review", but it looks like the general readership jumped the other way.
*******
Anyway, I am grateful to all who took the time to write a review, and congratulations indeed to all the winners, who undeniably wrote fantastic reviews by any standards. Cheers!
Throwing in my two cents worth - your Galen review was absorbing and very well written. As a plus, it was also one of the few reviews that I have found myself referring to in everyday conversation and therefore presumably relevant and memorable as well. Thanks, Zahn.
>As a plus, it was also one of the few reviews that I have found myself referring to in everyday conversation
Same here; ended up talking about it with and then sending it to my parents, and I'm usually a terrible and distant son!
I just discovered your blog the other day, it is pretty great so far!
(https://slimemoldtimemold.com/ for those too lazy to go up to the main post to get the link)
Yours was my favorite. Having been the first to be published, I had no idea what to expect the competition to be like. Then I read yours and decided there was no way I was winning.
Yours was my favorite for sheer skill of writing. You had me hooked right from the start on a topic I'm not particularly interested in - it's awe inspiring to write so well on such a topic. Congrats!
According to google, a typical edition of the original P&P clocks in at 406 pages, so just think about how much time you're saving!
Seriously though I am genuinely curious now that the results are in what people thought about length all around (for my review and the others). Every time I look back at the review now the little E.B. White on my shoulder is mumbling "omit words" over and over again, but I feel that way no matter what I write.
You seem like a cool person.
I thought your review was too long, but for me it got away with it by being very interesting. It's impossible for me to say whether your review could have been better if it was shorter, but I think writing a very long review is a high-risk strategy and I think in general reviewers should try to keep their word count way down below what yours ended up being.
On the one hand, I stopped reading one of the reviews part way through because it was too long; on the other hand, yours was my favourite and I think it might have been the longest(?). I'll leave it up to the economists to decide what that says about my revealed preferences. :P
I thought your review was perfectly fine as long as it was, but then I don't mind reading long texts, and even probably expect them to a bit better than short ones, all else being equal.
I really wanted to vote on the book review contest, but couldn't get through the Georgist review. It was good, but economics takes a lot of brainpower to digest. I got exhausted on my first attempt, picked it up again a few weeks later, and got exhausted again long before the end.
Seeing how scrupulous* some of you are, I wonder if one book review being much longer than the others affords it an unintuitive advantage -- anyone who finds it too long and boring and thus wouldn't vote for it, excludes themselves from voting because they didn't finish it, and thus feels it'd be unfair to vote because they didn't finish everything!
*I did read all the reviews, but my own conscience would be more than satisfied if I had merely skimmed a few, because I would take it as a sign that if the book review hadn't captivated me from the get-go to get me to not skim it, that would be a valid reason to judge it of lower quality. I would fully endorse taking such a view with my review --- if your eyes start to droop after a page or so it's already clear I've not written a great review in your eyes.
Well, that's a legitimate response. If you couldn't finish the review for whatever reason, you are not going to vote for it because you didn't find it appealing/convincing/interesting, and that's as good a reason as "I loved this one! Number One Vote all the way!"
Nobody, as lariusprime is pointing out, should feel bad about "everyone else loved this, I was a bad reader". Some of the reviews I was very "meh" about but I'm sure other people preferred them greatly. Any kind of a contest does involve some amount of subjectivity, and a contest such as this is going to include a lot of it, because "do I think this is a good review?" depends as much on "could I read it easily, did I have to force myself to finish it, do I hate the subject matter, did I think it was a terrible review of what was a good book" and so on?
If i didn't like excessively long posts, I'd be reading somebody else's blog.
I thought these were generally quite good!
Runner up reviews link (at the very bottom) has permissions misconfigured!
Should be fixed now - someone confirm?
Works for me.
Secondary confirmation
Whoa. Was not expecting this result. I am seriously, seriously humbled everyone. Thank you so much.
Terrific work, Lars! B* G*****, you deserved it.
Yours was definitely my favorite! Your writing is entertaining and I learned a lot; you've made me want to read the book myself!
I'm not surprised at all; when I saw that Scott made a 60% prediction that [redacted entry] won the contest, I was guessing that he was referring to yours. :) Congratulations on a fantastic review!
I really enjoyed your review too Eve!
Yes, this was one I liked a lot too! And the commentary it generated was thoughtful.
Thanks to both of you (Ayush and Lars), that's lovely to hear!
I really enjoyed your review, Eve. And since you linked to your dissertation, I enjoyed parts one and three of it. I'm afraid I couldn't follow the math in part two, which made me feel really stupid.
Awesome, super glad you enjoyed it! I'm not sure anyone in my dissertation committee fully followed the math! Part of that must be that I could have explained it better.
I have hit a brick wall every time I've tried to study number theory.
Couple of thoughts now that I'm processing the initial shock ---
- Scott rightly describes me as a "serious Georgist" but I'm hardly a scholar or anything (I don't even have a degree in econ).
- Anything insightful you found in my review is attributable either to George himself or many of far smarter people than myself that I consulted. I find Georgism convincing (obviously), but I'm also keen to make sure that I'm not just being taken in by a really persuasive argument.
- Ever since I wrote the review I've been doing my best to suss out to what extent Georgism has been tried in the last 140 years and what the empirical results are. Theory is great, but the question everyone really wants to know is if it *actually works* in the real world, what limitations does it run up against. Also in the best case that it works super great exactly as described, is it just one of those things that's totally politically unfeasible. All that stuff. To that end, would anyone be interested in reading a follow-up to the review that tries to seriously kick those tires and process the best available evidence? Perhaps styled in the "More Than You Wanted to Know" format, and then hoping I can live up to Scott's standards of rigor. I don't want to presume that Scott would subject you all to several thousand more unsolicited words from me, but perhaps it could find a place in a link roundup, or I could just link it in an open thread? Would anyone read this?
I would love to read that follow-up. Please do.
Oh man yeah!
>many of far smarter people than myself that I consulted.
That's called "doing your research", and it's a good and surprisingly-uncommon thing.
Hmm... weird; I always seem to find that *I* am, in fact, much smarter than the people I consult.
Do not pity me, friends! It is just my cross to bear.
the most humble ACX reader
You have my serious interest
I would absolutely read that follow-up. Also, it was an excellent review, and the "By George" shtick was both entertaining and helped with the pacing of an extremely long (deservedly so) piece of writing. Congrats, good sir!
Absolutely.
Definitely
I'd be happy to help with this. I've never found Georgism particularly convincing. But I have extensive practical real estate experience at a professional level and know a lot about its history. And I've been working on the bones of an anti-Georgist FAQ or more than you want to know type piece. A lot of it focuses on Georgism... just not holding up empirically in my view.
What part would your practical experience play in a putative Anti-Georgist FAQ?
That is — is it mainly what lead you to look into and then object to Georgism? Or do you find actual examples of Georgist principles failing out there in the wild? Or have you had to look at a lot of studies that don't seem to bear Georgism out? Or...
Of course, if you'd prefer to say "just read my FAQ when it comes out so I don't repeat myself", well, that's fine (and what I'D do in your place, because I'm horribly lazy)... but I'm curious to hear more IF you have the time and inclination.
I think part of the potential trap may be the change in conditions since George's time. The crude model of his theory is "Here's an empty lot in the middle of the city. Instead of the owner holding on to it for the price to go up so he can sell it on, there should be a mechanism of punishing speculators such that it is more efficient and cheaper to do something with that land. Build a factory, so that the locals can have employment! Build an apartment block, so that they may have housing!"
But we don't really do heavy industry manufacturing any more, not like that. See the opposition to Amazon setting up a new headquarters in Queens - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/06/amazon-new-york-city-offices-lease
The naive Georgist view would be that a big project like this in a working-class area was *precisely* what was needed to stimulate and provide employment and the downstream effects of that on the local economy (I don't think the boasting in the linked article that "they're coming to NY anyway now and they're setting up in Manhattan" is as good as it sounds and is not the victory AOC is making it out to be - it's great for Manhattan but what about Queens?)
But the *practical* effect was that this was perceived as demanding too many concessions and money from the city administration. The opposition to it would rather the site continue to sit empty. What has Georgism to say about that perverse incentive?
So in our new era, suppose an empty lot is Georgist land taxed to make the owners build upon it, or sell to someone who will build on it. Okay. Now the owners/investors/speculators slap up a block of luxury apartments. Costs $9,000 a month to rent, $20,000,000 to buy outright. Locals can't afford that, so you need outsiders to move in. Well, not your fault if most of the units are empty, now is it? Or that those purchasers are foreign investors? Is Georgism going to *force* you to rent out your apartments, how can it do that? Is it going to say "you have to build *affordable* apartments" and if it does, then it is going far beyond a simple land tax. You wanted us to build on the empty lot, we've done so, that it in the end still benefits speculators is not our fault.
I think motivated parties will find loopholes faster than the theory can pivot, and that updating to new conditions (employment is now office buildings for marketing and sales teams for multinationals, not Smith & Co. Pushpin Manufacturers) will mean a lot of changes to the base notion.
Building unproductively doesn't let you dodge LVT.
You still have to pay LVT no matter what's on the land, and the only way to make it worth paying is to use the land in a way that earns more than LVT costs, which empty luxury flats wouldn't.
Possible perverse incentive - build something so hideous that it lower LVT by making the entire area less desirable!
(Fortunately, I think anti-pollution and anti-noise regulations would stop this)
My reservation about Georgism is the same one I have about communism: looks great on paper, but in practice it probably relies too much on the ability to foresee and predict how human beings respond to incentives *and* it assumes too great a degree of homogeneity in human values and interests.
It human beings were programmable robots, Georgism would probably work great -- but so would communism, and for that matter any number of the social engineering schemes that already turn the tax code into a massive 10,000 page compedium.
I have no particular attachment to Georgism, other than an interested spectator. But it seems to me that we've gotten reasonably good at appraising the value of things, at least within an acceptable error margin, that it should be possible to at least ascertain what the rent value of the land is.
What about Georgism relies on a ertain human nature?
The first two. I'm not really a theoretician but Georgism doesn't seem to conform with my actual observed and studied reality. I know about real estate not out of some theoretical interest but because I do a fair bit of work in it.
As a complete amateur, reading this bit from the entry in Wikipedia:
" A land value tax, charging fees for exclusive use of land, as a means of raising public revenue is also a progressive tax tending to reduce economic inequality, since it applies entirely to ownership of valuable land, which is correlated with income, and there is generally no means by which landlords can shift the tax burden onto tenants or laborers. Landlords are unable to pass the tax on to tenants because the supply and demand of rented land is unchanged. Because the supply of land is perfectly inelastic, land rents depend on what tenants are prepared to pay, rather than on the expenses of landlords, and so the tax cannot be passed on to tenants."
Dude. Landlords can *always* find a way to pass the tax on to tenants. Put a land value tax on to whatever property they own, and they'll use some reason to pass that on to the tenant because their idea is "this is my property, I am renting it to make a profit, it is unfair to tax me, if I have to pay extra for the value then this means the rent needs to be higher because I am giving tenants a more valuable place to live".
There are terrible tenants out there but there are also terrible landlords, and if people are desperate enough to live someplace, they will pay 'under the counter' to live somewhere. "What, me a landlord? No, no, these sixteen people living here are all family members and friends and are certainly not paying me rent!" https://sylvieons.tumblr.com/post/656293788560572416
If a landlord could charge more rent then they would be already.
Why wait for LVT to raise rents, when they could raise them now?
LVT doesn't change the demand or supply so it doesn't change the price.
This is a very simplistic analysis. If all landlords coordinated to simultaneously raise prices they could. This type of coordination is illegal for precisely that reason. But tax increases don't require illegal or formal coordination: everyone knows they're coming so everyone can raise prices simultaneously.
Landlords would only bear the majority of the increase of a tax increase if land had an extremely high elasticity of demand. In other words, that raising price would cause people to consume less of it rather than pay more. In that case, landlords would be forced to not raise prices because their customers would leave and would have to eat the costs. But demand for housing is very inelastic. Famously so. Thus they can raise the prices and their tenants cannot exit the market all that easily.
Landlords compete with other landlords, that's why they don't raise rent. (Also, there are often regulations limiting the ability of landlords to up rent, especially during a tenancy.) But if a tax increase is coming, it seems reasonable to expect all landlords to up prices accordingly in order to maintain the profit margin that they're used to - if they don't pass on the cost, and all other factors remain the same, they will lose money and go out of business.
I admit that "all other factors remain the same" is where a Georgist would disagree - LVT makes properties less valuable by imposing an additional cost on ownership. However, I'll point out that many rental properties are mortgaged (or recently built with construction costs to recoup), and mortgages are based on purchase price and not on current price, so even if the property becomes worthless the landlord still owes the bank the exact same amount.
Given that landlords will hate an LVT, I imagine them to all publicly announce that they'll up rents if it gets passed, so it's not hard for them to all do it simultaneously.
Kinda like an adversarial collaboration? Sure, I'm down. To be clear in terms of format I think it'd be best for us to just each write our own pieces that stand alone and don't try to reach consensus for its own sake, but some of the research material I am explicitly looking for is the best arguments and evidence against Georgism, so if you can provide me with some of those that'd be swell.
What might be especially valuable, if you two both have the time and compatibility, would be a section describing the most relevant cases and the listing the best evidence about them that you have consensus on. Half of the challenge in reading a research piece like you (and he) are considering is that it's impossible to tell if the facts are getting cherry-picked (often entirely inadvertently by the author; they almost unavoidably apply an intuition of significance a reliability in line with their worldview.)
I wouldn't expect consensus on the analysis and conclusions to be doable, but consensus on the relevant set of facts and evidence might be possible.
This is a great point. I'd like to source critiques from this community specifically as its my target audience, and make sure every major concern or confusion someone brings up gets addressed.
That's fine. I suspect what I have that you don't is a thorough knowledge of the history of land ownership and taxes in a wide variety of settings including modern day America. I suspect what you have that I don't is a deeper knowledge of Georgist thought, especially modern Georgist thought.
Yeah I look forward to hearing what you have to say. It feels like cheating for me to just address theoretical objections, and all I really care about here is finding the truth, whatever that is (or the best approximation we're able to suss out). I've recently attracted a bunch of Georgists who have waaay better credentials and experience than me, so I hope you don't mind if I lean on them to get answers and evidence to address your critiques.
This is gonna take me a while, and I'm not interested in trying to score cheap points on you; what I envision is whenever you have some things to say (either in a publication or a comment or anything) I'll go do my research and let you know what I've found whenever I can, so if you have a reply to that in turn I'll try to follow up on that before I publish a final draft.
All subject to not writing *another* 15,000 word monstrosity, but you know, erring on the side of being thorough and fair and not exhausting my interlocutors. I'm not interested in shoveling out a Gish gallop.
This sounds great—I'm excited for it too.
To me, Georgism seems like a great idea with massive vested interests opposing it ever being implemented. It wouldn't be that difficult to rally public opposition, anything that increases the cost of living while simultaneously lowering house prices is not going to go down well with the general public. I'm not denying the benefits, but immediate increases in the cost of housing are inevitable for both owners and tenants.
Other than the political implausibility of it, the main practical difficulty is working out how much the Land Value Tax should be. However, it doesn't have to be perfect in order to work, and it could be phased in gradually to give us time to work out all of the problems. If it replaced another tax (like sales tax/VAT or income tax) it would probably be quite popular, since most people would end up paying less tax. I just don't think enough people understand Georgism to be sold on the idea that 0.1% of tax revenue will be experimentally shifted into a LVT.
It does sound like a great theory, but could it work? Does it work? Has it been tried? is exactly what I'd like to have a follow-up on.
I don't think people are necessarily very worried about the value of their houses falling, except that if they're paying a mortage for $X00,000 and now under the new Georgist land tax their house is worth $Y00,000 which is a lesser amount, they've been stuck with an extra expense. But a Georgist land tax on top of all the other local and government taxes might be a step too far. As you say, if it replaced VAT or something, it would be an easier sell. But if, as far as ordinary people were concerned, "this is another new tax on top of rates, water bills, sales tax, etc." then it's not going to be perceived favourably.
And honestly? I do think big developers and investors and so forth could find some wiggle-room, some loop-hole, around it to benefit. That's why there are tax lawyers and accountants, after all, finding ways that the really deep pockets don't have to pay as much taxes as the technical legal amount says, in perfectly legal tax limitation. I could see Ordinary Citizen Jones being in the position attributed to Warren Buffet: "I pay less tax than my secretary does".
One advantage of the tax is that there are fewer ways to wriggle out of it, because you can't exactly hide land. You can hide that you own it of course, but I assume that if you don't pay up the government will eventually just seize the asset and sell it to cover the unpaid tax.
There's obviously potential for corruption if you can convince the assessors to tax your land at less than its worth, but I think making this information publicly available could help with that - if the city centre has lower tax rates than the suburbs, people in the suburbs will demand an explanation. There's probably going to be some sneaky backheeling to value land less than it should be, but its hard to imagine it being more perverse than the existing system for personal and corporate tax.
I think the real way to assess this is to acknowledge that literally all systems are gamed for and by the rich, and the real test is not whether a proposed system *can* be gamed (because it certainly will be), but *how much*, and is that more or less than the status quo.
I'll try to make this part of my analysis in a follow up but I might need some help as it feels pretty squishy to grasp once you go beyond theory and into empirics.
"literally all systems are gamed for and by the rich"
Yeah, that's my view too. My concerns around a lovely theoretical model of a land tax is that somebody who can afford to buy a lot or property on a prime location in a big city that is worth tens of millions is going to have much less trouble finding a way around said tax than an ordinary person who inherited Granny's house when she popped her clogs and that house has now increased hugely in value, so said ordinary citizen gets hit with "congratulations on your inheritance, now you have to do something useful with it within thirty days or we're hammering you with punitive taxes on top of the death duties/inheritance tax and paying for Granny's funeral that you're already stuck with".
I definitely agree with that assessment, that's why I immediately try to think of ways to abuse any proposed system for personal gain! It's going to depend on the exact details, but my impression is that LVT would be very easy to game a little bit (since reasonable people could disagree on the assessment of land value), but difficult to completely evade.
Let me introduce you to Prop 13 in California. I pay about half the real estate taxes as my neighbor to my left, who bought 5 years later than me, in a real estate boom, but about twice the real estate taxes as my neighbor to the right, who bought 5 years before me in a real estate bust.
The issue is not the amount of land, the issue is *who* decides the value of the land, and on what basis? The latter has *always* been an incredible nest of corrupt snakes.
This is basically exactly why California's proposition system was never a good idea in the first place.
In-practice, most property owners are already paying a property tax already. I think it will just go from Rate * (value of land + value of improvements) to Rate * (rent value of land).
For most people, numbers will remain roughly the same.
I would love to hear more, I assume a few economists have had some thoughts since George and hearing more about the history of the idea would be great.
I wonder if Joe Stieglitz would be reachable for this project.
Hell, we want to read this so much I'd ask Scott if he wants to cowrite an article and publish it here, because I think he might.
Yes please!
This would be great
Definitely "it was tried here, eighteen months later half the population had been eaten by dragons and the inner city was now a portal to Hell (so no major change there)" coverage would be great.
Scott, I think granting the winner a second guest post that is a continuation only seems like a small favor to grant! (unless of course of course prominently linking to the author’s blog that has it is an even nicer favor)
Yes please, I think your review has made me a Georgist, so now I'd like to hear all the counterarguments and occasions on which it's been tried and failed. It seems like an obvious good idea, but so did socialism.
I'm in the same camp myself. I'd like it to be true, which means I really owe it to myself to go out and see if I can find evidence that it actually is.
(and honestly grapple with contrary evidence that disproves it, should such exist)
What we need is to go out and see if we can find evidence that it's false. I've fallen for this sort of thing before, and evidence that it's true will be thick on the ground and easy to come by, independent of whether it's true or false.
Evidence that it's false will be hard to come by, and will somehow magically slide off our minds.
I stayed Marxist (my childhood faith) for a while after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took an evening in the pub with a Cambridge economic history don who specialized in Russia countering my every argument for me to begin to see the problems with it. An unbiased mind wouldn't have given Communism the time of day after about 1950 I would think.
What you need to do is to write a vicious anti-Georgist diatribe, pull out all the stops to discredit it as far as you can in your own mind. Live all the arguments against it and make them your own. Take all the arguments for it and show why they don't work.
Find all the evil weasels who are working for the Devil and raising trivial objections to Georgism out of their own self-interest and work out how to make their arguments better and more damning.
It's hard and it hurts, and at the end you'll be able to convince most anyone of either position, but you won't hold either position yourself any more and a piece of your identity will have gone missing and all your former friends will think you're a traitor.
Good luck!
Yes, which is why I've been openly soliciting everyone's best contrary arguments here and elsewhere -- sorry if my shorthand "evidence that it's true" implied I was supporting verificationism rather than falsificationism for this particular project. Whether I live up to the task I'll leave the community's judgment.
I enjoyed pretty much all of these, but my two personal favorites were "On the Natural Faculties" and "Down and Out in Paris and London", and it looks like I wasn't alone in this judgment!
Well done everyone. Thanks so much for all the time you spent writing these. I read every one of the main ones and a lot of the ones from the community pile.
Like most other readers, I loved your review! I look forward to reading your blog
Ah thanks :) Hope you like boring game industry inside-baseball!
Terrific review, took the top spot for me early on and never relented
"Since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value!"
Well Actually, thanks to present value discounting, it really isn't - let's see, assuming a 1% annual interest rate, the value would be $119.95 per year, and dividing by .01 for the perpetuity gives $11,995 total. Assuming you're immortal, that's quite a bit more than the monetary prizes, but it's not nearly infinite!
How can we model the risk that the price of an ACX subscription will be adjusted upward for inflation in the future?
Since the prize is being paid out in subscriptions and not in cash, that would only increase the value! I have no time for searching out actual inflation rates, but if subscription price adjustments are matching or outpacing interest, *then* the value of this prize will truly be infinite
Way more infinite in fact.
I'm here for the substantial metaphysical benefits, personally.
What about when the Fed pushes hard enough to give us negative long term interest rates? All perpetuities go vertical.
>and dividing by .01 for the perpetuity
Wait... what?
I haven't slept in over 30 hours, so please excuse me if this is unforgivably dense, but — why .01?
Assuming you know how present value discounting works (if not I can elaborate), it's because I assumed 1% interest for the sake of the toy example, so the PVs of the annualized payments form an infinite geometric series which converges to 119.95/(1-.99)
Actually just realized I'm wrong, I should be using (1-1/1.01) in the denominator. So the total will actually be a bit higher
Morbid caveat: I think it's reasonable to argue that a subscription loses all value if nothing is being produced, so technically we should consult an actuarial table and estimate Scott's annual risk of death, unless we're being very optimistic about the life extension stuff.
It's conceivable that Scott could find a worthy successor.
I mean, maybe *you* can conceive of that...
Scott's existence proves that bloggers as good as he is are possible. The odds are that he has decades to find a successor. That's how I conceive of it.
Obviously this reward scheme is a ploy to get us all to back life extension tech as a way to protect the value of our investment!
If a subscription to A 10 costs $10/month, assuming no inflation and that AC10 goes on forever, the value of an infinity subscription to AC10 would be equal to the value of a risk-free dollar denominates security that pays dividends equal to $10/month.
#iareapedant
Pedantry buddies! I did a toy example
I wrote one of the runners-up (about bears) and am super-impressed with the quality and variety of reviews that people put together for this contest. They show what a huge and curious readership SSC and ACX have enjoyed, and provide lots of food for thought. (NB: probably better in most respects for your community than providing food for bears, according to the book I reviewed.)
If I remember correctly, the contest generated an order of magnitude or so more entrants than Scott first expected.
Congratulations to the winners and runners-up, and to Scott for inspiring so many people to participate in this.
Hey, that one was pretty good. I thought a lot of the reviews that didn't make it in were pretty good, in fact.
(A few were a bit nuts, though...)
The reader's choice award, Disunited Nations vs. Dawn Of Eurasia links to the runners-up document instead.
If they post here under a different name, could you add that?
For the guy who did 'through the eye of a needle' i got the book on audible, well worth it. Thanks.
Thanks so much to everyone who voted and wrote reviews. Just getting promoted to finalist by readers really meant a lot, especially after looking at the other reviews and seeing how rigorous and well-written a lot of them were. The results couldn't have me happier, as the 'Progress and Poverty and 'On the Natural Faculties' reviews were definitely my favorites of the bunch.
I've just started a blog where I plan to review more books and hopefully do longer write-ups on LW and ACX adjacent topics. In my most recent post, https://whimsi.substack.com/p/responding-to-comments-on-down-and I respond to some of the comments on the Orwell review and try to flesh out a couple of ideas I only gestured at. Forgive me if I'm rough in places, as that Orwell review is the first long-form piece I've ever published online. Still very much trying to figure out tone, topics, etc.
So once again, thanks a lot to Scott and everyone that participated! I'm a long-time reader of the blog, and to see that people in this community enjoy my writing means more than I can put into words in a single comment.
> that Orwell review is the first long-form piece I've ever published online.
Well, way to knock it out of the park on the first at-bat!
I've been one of those 'write a lot and show no one writers for a while now, so to continue the metaphor, you could say I've had a long off-season!
Congratulations to the finalists! This contest was a delight. A special shout out to Solenoid Entity who recorded an audiobook worth of podcasts to help folks like myself consume it all.
Is that the wonderful person who does the SSC podcast recordings? I was pretty shocked at the quality and consistency of the readings, especially with dense material. Solenoid: I sincerely apologise for every time I made you say <link in post>!
(To be clear: shocked at the *high* quality and consistency)
Oh huh my own review is on that podcast too. In hindsight that's not surprising but I hadn't realized it. Cool!
A big thanks to all reviewers! There were so many amazing reviews, even among the non-finalists!
I thought all of the reviews were good, and most were excellent; but, just in case the authors look through these comments, I wanted to express extra appreciation for:
-- Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are, reviewed by Jeff Russell (not as deeply philosophical as I expected but also much more pleasant and fun than I expected)
-- Why Buddhism Is True, reviewed by Eve Bigaj (didn't agree with a good chunk of the reviewer's ideas, but made me think and I am by no means sure I'm right and she's wrong)
--Through The Eye Of A Needle, reviewed by Tom Powell (fascinating subject, good book, great review)
--Addiction By Design, reviewed by Ketchup Duck (I had some criticism about this one but can no longer remember it, while I do still remember that it was very interesting and enjoyable)
--The Accidental Superpower, reviewed by John B (really impressed by the thoroughness and skill of the reviewer; I wouldn't be surprised if I got more out of this review than from the book itself; but the book is also a very interesting one as well)
*******
Thanks to all the reviewers and congratulations to all finalists and winners! Also: please note, if you didn't make it into the "finalists", well, I read a couple in there I thought were easily good enough to make it in and have a decent chance of coming out a winner. I wish we could have had more than one "community choice" review!
Reviewer of The Accidental Superpower here. Thanks for the kind words — and for the many thoughtful comments people left at the review itself; the main reason I wrote was to have people poke holes in Zeihan’s model that weren’t obvious to me, and think that many commenters lived up to that expectation.
No worries — thanks for the review itself! (In another, earlier comment I made, somewhere below, I mention "the *The Accidental Superpower* review" as absolutely deserving a top 3 spot, and I stand by that; still, I'm glad if was at least featured on the blog, especially if you got what you wanted from the comments.)
I thought this review was excellent too.
This contest was a really good idea. The reviews were great.
Yay! My favourite one won! Sorry to see Addiction by Design and The Collapse of Complex Societies didn't make it into the top 3. I loved those ones too.
Well done everyone!
What I _really_ want to know, though, is whether Scott was correct in his very confident prediction that [redacted] would win the book review contest! I was amazed to see it at the time, that he was willing to put 60% probability on just one out of 17 finalists. Does he really know us that well? Also, I expect he won't tell us, but I'd love to know how close it was, even just in qualitative terms.
No. 99 here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-predictions-for-2021
I'm also interested. I gave it a 40% and a friend gave it a 20%
Congratulations to the winners and finalists! My top three were: 1. On the Natural Faculties, 2. How Children Fail, 3. Addiction by Design
The results indicate that modern non-fiction did not have a chance.
Isn't "down and out" modern non-fiction?
I'm confused by the readers choice award? Who awarded the other possitions if not the readers?
Scott hand-chose the finalists readers could choose from, but the reader’s choice award was where readers could choose among - all - contestants, not just the Scott-picked shortlist.
(at least that’s how I interpret it?)
From https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-176:
> I asked you all to vote on entries from the Runners-Up Packet to promote to finalists. There were three clear winners - the two reviews I posted last week, and a review contrasting Peter Zeihan's Disunited Nations with Bruno Macaes' Dawn of Eurasia. I've already posted a Zeihan review, and I worry readers are getting tired of these reviews and don't have the patience for a semi-duplicate, so I'm awarding the new Zeihan review...some prize to be determined later, like "People's Choice" or something, that doesn't involve me making it a finalist. Don't worry, there will be money involved. If you want to read it, you can find it here as "Disunited Nations (2020) vs. Dawn of Eurasia (2017)"
Congratulations to the winners and many thanks to Scott for what was probably heaps of work and hassle. Plus the extremely generous prizes.
I'd like to second that. Scott has the dual task of being an influential writer, for which he is justifiably lauded, and the task of being a decent human being who puts in hours of work into supporting others, which is largely thankless work.
Congrats to the winners!
I'd be curious to see more detail about the voting results - even just a rank order of number of votes each received would be interesting (even though I think there's a decent chance I got the fewest), but also correlations between them. I understand if that kind of thing feels bad to share though.
I don't think I received an email about my subscription. I was already a subscriber, so maybe that's expected?
Oh, also interested in correlations between votes and how many hearts they got on substack, which currently stand at
31 - Order Without Law
42 - Plagues and Peoples
42 - The Accidental Superpower
44 - Through The Eye Of A Needle
48 - Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are
48 - Why Buddhism Is True
54 - Double Fold
54 - Humankind
59 - The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
63 - Where's My Flying Car?
70 - Down And Out In Paris And London
82 - The Wizard And The Prophet
103 - Progress And Poverty
106 - Addiction By Design
131 - How Children Fail
144 - On the Natural Faculties
So from looking at the winners, the correlation probably wasn't amazing.
(Whoops, missed The Collapse Of Complex Societies from there, at 48.)
The top three were reviews that I liked, so I'm happy with the result! Congratulations to everybody and I hope we can do this again sometime!
Could we collect all the other reviews on another site?
During the downtime of SSC, I floated the idea that those of us who wanted to keep the tradition of SSC alive could start a group blog, practicing epistemic charity, and trying to contribute similarly long and thoughtful essays. Or essais.
I still think that such a blog - with Scott's blessing, of course - might be an interesting experiment. And starting with all these reviews from people who are clearly SSC/ACX readers would be fascinating.
Anyway, I throw that into the mix.
This contest was amazing! Really glad my preferred ones ended up winning, and even more that you decided to quintiple their winnings! What an awesome gesture 🙂
Is anyone else kind of disappointed that while Scott massively increased the prizes, he didn't expand the number of prize-winning reviews? Both Scott and the commenters liked to emphasize that many of the reviews were very good, but now the implication is that the three winners were many leagues above the others, which I don't really feel to be the case... It would be interesting to see what the final tally of votes was, and how many points Scott himself awarded to each of the finalists.
Given that $10,000 ended up being given away as prizes, awarding e.g. $250 for 4th and 5th place, and $100 each for places 6-10, wouldn't impact the top 3 prizes very much, but it would motivate more readers to compete in the future. Writing a book review feels rather Sisyphean if only about 3% of entries actually get a cash prize; in the last adversarial collaboration, for comparison, 25% of entries ended up getting a prize. An ACX subscription is great too, but I'm not sure how many people would be willing to go through the trouble of writing a lengthy review, when the only prize they could realistically hope for was a free subscription.
(Disclaimer: I wrote one of the runners-up, so take everything above with a pinch of salt.)
I didn't write anything, and I endorse this.
I think I'm a pretty good writer and a damned smart fellow, but I am often puzzled by what gets popular and what doesn't — even my top research/review posts on Reddit aren't the ones I personally think are best! — so I have no confidence that I'd be in that 3%; but top fourth? Maybe worth a try.
What review was yours, out of curiosity? I voted for a couple runners-up that I thought were easily good enough to have been finalists.
Even professional writers are bad at predicting what of what they're written becomes popular or not. Editors don't always get it right, either.
I have a pet theory that game designers are an underappreciated resource in today’s society, because they’re taught to think very deeply about human systems and how those systems might affect people’s behaviour in both expected and unexpected ways. They’ve probably spent more time theorizing about, and more importantly *experimenting with*, human systems, than almost any other profession. (Though as a hobbyist game designer myself I may be biased.)
All this to say: congrats Lars, and don’t sell yourself short. You may well have been the perfect person to analyze and summarize Georgism for this blog’s readers, because ultimately Georgism is nothing more than a proposal to change the rules of the IRL games that we play. A follow-up post would be more than welcome.
I appreciate the comments, though I don't wanna get TOO high on my own supply :).
Having worked in educational games at the start of my career, I have a lot of mixed feelings about the subject and reasons to be humble. To make my background clear, I did my Master's thesis on Ian Bogost's theory of "procedural rhetoric", with an accompanying game as my exemplar, "Super Energy Apocalypse", a game about sustainable energy use and zombies, with numbers based on real world research (though I kind of cringe at the rigor looking back now).
Sadly it was flash based, so you'll have to dig deep to get it to work today:
https://www.kongregate.com/games/larsiusprime/super-energy-apocalypse-recycled
I think Molleindustria sums all of my mixed feelings better than I ever could:
https://molleindustria.org/GamesForCities/
I'm not an explicit Marxist like he is, but apart from that he's totally on the money.
In short, systems thinking is crucial, but it also allows you to prove literally anything you want because the map is not the territory, and it's very easy for gamedevs like myself to think we're smarter than we actually are, and overestimate the power of systems and underestimate our bias in tinkering them (is the system outputting something you didn't expect because of a bug or because your ideas are wrong? How do you know? If it outputs stuff in agreement with your views but it's only because of a bug, will you know to notice? Will you be motivated to 'fix' it?)
I think the best insight from the article above is the section on the Landlord's game, to bring things back in a beautiful full Georgist circle. Elizabeth Maggie isn't to be celebrated simply for being a pioneer of "procedural rhetoric" marrying game design and pedagogy, but ALSO because she had the insight to suggest that players consider two different kinds of rulesets. IE, to encourage the players to deliberately envision a different world and to envision the consequences of changing the rules themselves, rather than just set up a toy model that always outputs a predefined conclusion.
All that said, one of the background facts that led to my eventual land-pilling is the fact that one of my favorite childhood games was the SNES edition of SimCity, and no matter how hard I tried, there was always ONE citizen complaint that always seemed to stick around as #1 no matter what I did:
"Housing costs are too high!"
(WTF? But I did everything "right!" I improved all the land values!)
This contest was really fun.
The most striking part of the experience for me (Humankind reviewer) was that within a couple of hours of the review going up, I'd learnt far more about the subject from reading the comments, than I had from hours of reading the book. Feedback from this community is startlingly insightful.
Yes; the comments here are good.
@scott It might be a good idea to add bylines to the guest reviews now that the authorship isn't a secret.
Seconded, provided they consent. I'd also like to know if any of them have blogs. Many of these were very good.
I also really enjoyed Why Children Fail. I feel like I heard many of those ideas floating around, but this review made a good case for them in a way that swayed me for the first time.
> All finalists win a permanent free subscription to Astral Codex Ten - since a subscription costs $10/month, this is technically an infinity dollar value!
"He gave you a billion dollar raise?"
"It's not as good as it sounds."
https://dilbert.com/strip/2009-01-11
But in this case we actually do know that Scott Alexander won't live forever. Unless he knows something we don't know?! (but even then, contest winners will die off instead)
Is there any way to "sort by controversial"? I'd love to know which review was the most polarizing.
I'm not sure if that works when there's no equivalent to a dislike/downvote. Hard to tell a controversial review from one which merely didn't interest many people.