Why Georgism Lost Its Popularity

I think you're right, Georgism doesn't get passed because it goes against the interests of landowners who have overwhelming political influence. But if the actual problem we're trying to solve is high rents, maybe that doesn't require full Georgism? Maybe we just need to make construction legally easier. There's strong opposition to that too, but not as strong as literally all landowners.

I feel like suburban homeowners are the key group here. They have the most votes among landowning groups, and the strongest motivation to oppose anything that reduces property values because their home represents all of their wealth. There is also the way-of-life question, because the economics of the suburbs seem really difficult under Georgism.

Something like an exemption for the first sale after the tax is passed would be a simple solution to taking some of the sting out, and makes sure no one has to unilaterally lose their investment to a tax.

Actually, in my father's day, there was this one infamous landlord who people used to point at. Who was it, Claude? "Peter Rachman" yes that was it. People used to talk about "Rachmanism" which apparently just meant "being a cruel and unscrupulous landlord", but which could probably be expanded to encompass home owner associations organizing to lobby against zoning reform if efforts were made, because when people hear ism they expect to see a civic ideology.

Unfortunately one of his most prominent sins was excessive subdivision, so he wasn't exactly a nimby.

And also, yeah, in reality — for instance in New Zealand which has it especially bad, where substantially more than half of the families in the country own land — land investment is just a popular way of keeping savings. The last Labour government felt a need to promise, despite confessing the will, not to touch it.

I mean, yes.  Real Estate is about the only perpetual bond still available to buy.  Current owners stand to lose their entire investment (in the land portion, at least, but also in the improvements because they can't be separated and bankrupt is bankrupt).  Those who hope to invest in real-estate lose their dream, which is a surprisingly powerful factor in public sentiment.

The key seems to be (like other communist nationalizations) painting ALL landowners as the bad guys.  Or trying to convince people that "only the big guys" will be impacted, but that's so transparently a lie that it probably doesn't fly anymore.

I feel like it's still Moloch to blame, if a sufficient bribe to landowners would cost less than indefinitely continued rent-seeking. 

I don't have any calculations to offer in support; but I would generally expect an individual landowner's time preference to be lower than society's as a whole, so I suspect this is indeed the case.

So the actual reason is that landowners don't want to be seen taking a bribe, because that would involve acknowledging they have been knowingly rent-seeking since 1879; and the government doesn't want to openly bribe them for moral hazard whatever; so even though everyone would be better off by their own lights it can't happen. And that's fairly moloch-flavored.

Maybe "abstract" was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It's possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I'm not sure there's actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it's usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)

For grey civics, I don't know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that's it. I've been considering the slogan "defending zoning isn't compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don't believe in progress."

Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.

On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it's not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn't real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.

But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don't try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don't think we know what to say to that.

Thanks. Is there any argument that its popularity is any different from communism (in theory) popularity? “Government will make better resource decisions than profit-motivated private entities”.

Has any modern proponent tried to analyze the path from here to there (how to compensate current landowners for the taking) or what the new equilibrium is like (how to operate in a world where the government owns all the land, and people/private orgs own the improvements)?

but more because of measurement errors

I sometimes think of growing private wealth as the fee that a democracy must pay for the services of the techne that it cannot expropriate.

I'm not sure that cleaving a distinction between the meanings of "possession" and "ownership" is a winnable battle.

The Square/Cube Law makes it physically impossible to build megastructures like space elevators, mass drivers, orbital rings, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law

This was a surprisingly ignorant comment by T. K. Van Allen, given that O'Neill was a physicist and included all his calculations. I suspect Van Allen never actually read the 'Steel structure' math in O'Neill's essay The Colonization of Space. The rest of Van Allen's bullet points also seem ignorant of O'Neill's calculations further down in the essay. I don't disagree with the bottomline that the cost is prohibitive, I just wished Van Allen engaged with O'Neill's math.

That's not what I said.

You literally put "Educating people about biological realizm" in the "Ideas For Re-Popularizing Georgism". What else can you mean by this strategy if not spreading the ideas of BR and then build upon them to spread the ideas of Georgism?

My point was that understanding population dynamics makes people more likely to support Georgism, and that population dynamics is part of biological realism.

It's at least not obvious, considering that you seen to disagree with George himself about population dynamics. But regardless of whether the objective point is true or not, there are a lot of different things that make people support Georgism - it has intersections with all kind of views across the political spectrum. However, instead of making a general point to take advantage of this versatility, and sell Georgism to different groups of people appealing to different talking points which this particular group would be more likely to be influenced by, you specifically talk about a niche view such as BR.

Even if people deny biology, promoting biological realism is still good for our society, for other reasons. I'd even say that understanding population dynamics is more important than implementing Georgism.

So this seems to be the actual reason why you single out BR like this. Not because it's actually going to make Georgism more popular, but because you like both of them, you see their connections and you want to spread both of their memes.

Again, there is nothing wrong in wanting to spread multiple memplexes at once, the problem is when you delude yourself and others into thinking that spreading one is a great strategy of spreading the other.

I'm aware that associating Georgism with Biological Realism might damage some of Georgism's appeal, but that's a Guilt by Association Fallacy, so I'm not concerned with it.People need to learn to recognize and understand fallacies.

I absolutely sympatize with the last sentence. But whether something is a fallacy or not is irrelevant when we are specifically talking about popularity. Without public appeal Georgism is not going to be popular. And if the public is vulnerable to fallacies, then we should be concerned with them. 

If you think BR is so important that burning reputation of Georgism to promote BR is worth it, then please frame it like that instead of misleading people that promoting BR is net good for popularity of Georgism.

Afaik rent in japan is low on a global stage, and is only high relative to japanese wages?

OTOH, japanese rent shouldn't be high relative to japanese wages (unless there are a whole lot of foreigners doing remote work or something) so I guess you could still say that the rent is too high.

While I've not actually seen this argument, I suspect one answer to the decline in popularity of Georgism might be found in the Coase Therom. Government taxing all land rends is merely a transfer of ownership and results in the known transfer aspect of the assignment of property rights in Coase's example. But the allocative impact of that assignment is supposed to be zero, resources still get allocated to the highest valued use. As such, I would wonder if market prices (i.e., rental prices for a place to live) would actually change or that somehow more of the assumed withheld land actually comes to market.