Why Georgism Lost Its Popularity

I think it is pretty clear who is standing in the way of Georgism: Landowners. They stand to lose the most, and those with a lot of property typically have a larger influence on economic property. The problem is that there is not a single organized landowner you could paint as the bad guy. It is a distributed mass that is hard to counter. 

Socialism / communism is about equally abstract as Georgism, and it certainly inspired a lot of people to fight! Similarly, Republican campaigns to lower corporate tax rates, cut regulations, reduce entitlement spending, etc, are pretty abstract (and often actively unpopular when people do understand them!), but have achieved some notable victories over the years. Georgism is similar to YIMBYism, which has lots of victories these days, even though YIMBYism also suffers from being more abstract than conspiracy theories with obvious villains about people "hoarding" vacant housing or chinese investors bidding up prices or whatever. Finally, Georgism itself was extremely popular once, so it clearly has the potential!! Overall, I don't think being abstract is fatal for a mass movement.

But I also don't think that we need to have some kind of epic Georgist popular revolution in order to get Georgist policies -- we can do it just by making small incremental technocratic reforms to local property tax laws -- getting local governments to use tools like ValueBase (developed by Georgist Lars Doucet) to do their property value assessments, getting reforms in a few places and then hopefully seeing success and pointing to that success to build more momentum elsewhere, etc.

As Lars Doucet tells it, the main problem with historical Georgism wasn't unpopularity (it was extremely popular then!), but just the technical infeasibility of assessing land value separate from the value of the buildings on the land. But nowadays we have machine learning tools, GIS mapping systems, satellite imagery, successful home-value-estimation companies like Zillow and Redfin, etc. So nowadays we can finally implement Georgism on a technical level, which wasn't possible in the 1890s. For more on this, see the final part of Lars's epic series of georgism posts on Astral Codex Ten: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-can-unimproved?utm_source=url

Okay I've thought of a class of slogans for georgism. Something about land not really belonging to anyone because no one created it, about land and space and radio spectrum and the realm of ideas being the shared heritage of all of humanity because drawing lines around it and declaring it to belong to whoever got there first is arbitrary and silly and as we know in so many cases economically dysfunctional.

These principles are a bit idealistic, but it seems almost required for a political slogan to overreach its realpolitik basis somewhat, if all we said "supply can't be increased, so price signals are less important" or whatever, few would be moved to revolt.

I believe the intention in Georgism is to levy a tax that eliminates appreciation in the value of the land. This is effectively the same as renting the land from the government. You are correct in that it would prevent people from investing in land -- investment in land is purely rent-seeking behavior, and benefits no one; building improvements on land (eg mines, factories, apartment complexes) that generate value, however, does.

Nobody is intending to tax land at 100%. I heard most proposals target 80%. Partly because of your reason, I guess, but more because of measurement errors.

Georgism is different from government ownership because Georgists still support private possession of land, while opposing private ownership of land. Private possession is necessary to solve the Tragedy of the Commons, and it's also necessarily to incentivize the titleholders to use their land effectively. Georgists also believe that titleholders should own all of the improvements that they make to their land. The land value tax only applies to the unimproved value of land.

If a titleholder loses his/her land because he/she can't use the land effectively enough to pay the land value tax, then that's actually a good thing. Confiscating land from people who are using it unproductively is necessarily in order to ensure that all land is being used to its maximum efficiency and increase economic wealth. That's a feature, not a bug.

I can answer your other questions if you want me to.

If you think that "humans will be living on Mars and O'Neill cylinders 30 years from now", then you probably haven't tried to calculate whether that's actually economically feasible and whether it's practical to get to Mars and live there:

• 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
• 12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
• O'Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O'Neill Cylinder that's 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
• Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
• So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that's only for one cylinder.
• For comparison, the world's nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.

And that's only the cost to put an O'Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O'Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that's comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.

For more information, I recommend reading Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.

in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of "you can't make more land" isn't true.

It is true. You can't make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether we like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.

Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it's far too expensive to try that. I didn't even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won't be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.

In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would've achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn't happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we've nearly reached its limits.

Another misconception that's worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There's obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.

It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don't have to wait 30 years to do it.

No, that's a huge oversimplification, and it's much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.

If it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes, then why bother?

Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.

Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven't even colonized Antarctica.

Here you are proposing to take a simple and straightforward idea of Georgism that people from all across the political spectrum can agree on, and explain it through the complexity and controversy of "Biological Realism".

That's not what I said. My point was that understanding population dynamics makes people more likely to support Georgism, and that population dynamics is part of biological realism. 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.

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.

That depends on what you consider to be a "housing shortage". The cost of rent is a major reason why birth rates remain low in China, Japan, and other countries. One of the reasons why capsule hotels are popular in Japan is because rent is so expensive.