This story was faithfully transposed to *bande dessinée" (European comics) by Martin Veyron in 2016. "Ce qu'il faut de terre à l'homme" won a prize at the Angoulême Festival, and I recommend it very much if you can read French. My only complaint with it is that the handful of Cyrillic texts in the drawings are not made of Russian words but simple transliterations of French words.
Among the short novels wrote by Tolstoi, my personal preference is for "Father Sergius". A young prince can't support any more the royal court, so he flees outside of his world, then struggles in trying to find meaning and peace in his life.
> Tolstoy also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George
> towards the end of his life, Tolstoy become more and more occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism.
> He spoke of great admiration of Henry George, stating once that "People do not argue with the teaching of George; they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree."
...I have never really looked into it, but I happened on a paragraph that makes it sound like it might be an approach to dealing with the problems people complain about a lot these days:
"Douglas proposed to eliminate the gap between purchasing power and prices by increasing consumer purchasing power with credits which do not appear in prices in the form of a price rebate and a dividend. Formally called a "Compensated Price" and a "National (or Consumer) Dividend", a National Credit Office would be charged with the task of calculating the size of the rebate and dividend by determining a national balance sheet, and calculating aggregate production and consumption statistics."
"Based on his conclusion that the real cost of production is less than the financial cost of production, the Douglas price rebate (Compensated Price) is determined by the ratio of consumption to production. Since consumption over a period of time is typically less than production over the same period of time in any industrial society, the real cost of goods should be less than the financial cost.
For example, if the money cost of a good is $100, and the ratio of consumption to production is 3/4, then the real cost of the good is $100(3/4) = $75. As a result, if a consumer spent $100 for a good, the National Credit Authority would rebate the consumer $25. The good costs the consumer $75, the retailer receives $100, and the consumer receives the difference of $25 via new credits created by the National Credit Authority.
The National Dividend is justified by the displacement of labour in the productive process due to technological increases in productivity. As human labour is increasingly replaced by machines in the productive process, Douglas believed people should be free to consume while enjoying increasing amounts of leisure, and that the Dividend would provide this freedom."
This story has stuck with me for years. Any time I've over-promised what I could deliver or stand to miss a deadline or am otherwise stressed out by situations of my own creation it comes back to me.
This website often focuses on ambition and furiously chasing one's dreams, but it's nice to have reminders that in the end, it's the small comforts and relationships we've built that really matter.
> in the end, it's the small comforts and relationships we've built that really matter.
Or maybe none of that matters at all, since we all die alone one way or another, it's the journey and not the destination. Life is to be lived, experienced, and one could argue dying abruptly in aggressive pursuit of your dreams is ideal.
Absolute classic. Another Tolstoy short story I really love is the tale of "The Two Pilgrims". You read them once. And they stay with you your entire life ;)
The basic point of Georgism is that landownership is the root of most of the economic evil in the world and land should all be expropriated and held in common. (but don't want to expropriate capital or do anything to it, unlike the Marxists: Marx called Georgism "Capitalism's last ditch")
So strangely enough, it's not about greed in general, it's about land specifically.
I have tried understanding Georgism a few different times, but I struggle to understand pricing: assuming we could fairly solve the transition from a society in which people currently own land, how would land be valued?
Who determines what land is worth? In a society with property rights, the market bids up land that is undervalued according to society's current needs and expectations and bids down land that is overvalued. When not significantly hindered by government zoning policy, it is pretty good at generating more buildings where there is high demand (see Dallas, TX). If the answer is a bureaucracy, it seems like a system of price controls where prices will inevitably be wrong and misallocate assets. I'm not aware of any country that has yet demonstrated the ability to successfully set direct prices of important economic assets for more than a decade without causing huge surpluses or (more commonly) shortages. A direct price control removes all input information from the market, whereas existing price floors (minimum wages), price ceilings, and subsidies tend to create smaller scale problems.
'Land ownership' actually means 'rights for exclusive use of land'. Government owns the land but gives out rights to use to people. If oil deposit or gold mine is found on it, the right is often revoked after compensating the rights holder.
The prices for rights of use are determined by market, but usually bundled together with prices of buildings on it.
One way to look at Georgist critique of current land system is that the rights of use are sold once but held infinitely long. If you got lucky and bought a piece of land in downtown Manhattan 200 years ago for 20 bucks, now you wouldn't need to pay anyone for granting you that ownership right. Basically land (and natural resources) are owned by people who got lucky, not by people who actually use it (such as a restaurant which has to rent it from that lucky holder). If the ownership rights were not given for infinite amount of time but reentered into an auction every, say 7 years, the allocation of land would then go to people who actually need it. It is the same economical problem as Domain Name allocation on web.
People 'own' land on paper only. The government actually owns it no matter if you are in China, Europe or United States.
Georgism is also compatible with a system where land is auctioned, it's just that the proceeds of the auction go to the state instead of the owner of the land. So you could do auctions and market stuff. Without the possibility of profit from appreciation, of course, the land value would be much lower. But land has value even without appreciation.
I don't know if it's how Georgian works, but this shouldn't mystify you in principle: municipalities do it all the time for property taxes: set a budget for the year (mostly going to schools), then determine every plot's relative value to all of the other plots. Divide up the budget along these percentages.
Basically, the social value of land is 100% socially constructed, but under a system of landownership, it's 100% privately held and all the profit goes to private hands. There are multiple empty lots very close to downtown SF which are worth millions, tens of millions that the landlord didn't do jack shit to improve, that everyone else improved the value of, that the entire value of is the location. But when the landlord sells, only they get the value.
But it's easy as hell to tax land and impossible to avoid the tax (just show up with cops, what the hell are they going to do, move the land? - and if they don't pay, just sell the land to someone else, although usually the aim is to collect the tax when transactions happen) So tax it. 100%. Georgism's tax suggestions go: have that 100% land tax (not property tax), have no other taxes, that's it. Also tax networks which have an inherent monopoly effect, it was also suggested by Henry George.
Nothing to do with agrarian points of view, really. Georgism was created in SF, it was most popular in NYC, and it was talking about the problems of the first properly modern cities in America and Britain.
In Georgist terms 'land' means any non-renewable natural opportunity such as thr actual land, magnetic spectrum (wifi, 5g)… deposit of oil or iron ore or even ancient sites built by previous civilizations that nobody can claim inheritance to nowadays.
Labor is in theory infinitely expandable. Capital is infinitely expandable. Land (and natural opportunities) is fixed in supply, so according to Georgists there is no moral argument for favoring somebody for its monopolization. It should be community owned and rights of use to it should be given out to people, priced by a market mechanism.
Labor and capital don't suffer from fixed supply or renewability so according to Georgists there is no need to prevent it from expanding, eg. by slapping taxes on it.
Georgist movement is also known as single-tax or zero-tax movement, because they advocate that there should be no taxes on labor, consumption or capital. The only tax implemented should be the natural monopoly tax (land value tax). They say it would be enough to finace government from it because there are crazy trillions of dollars parked in real estate. Real estate price is actually land value price (location, location, lovation), so only land tax would suffice and there is no need for property taxation, which is actually product of someone's labor.
Some Georgists say that Land Value Tax is not even a tax but a payment for exclusive rights of use. You pay for the service the government gives you directly, therefore it's not a tax. In this way they argue you can run a society with exactly ZERO taxes and paradoxically raise even more money than current tax system.
Land is not an unlimited resource and therefore a public good. This is the same principle the FCC applies to the airwaves (obligated to say here - fuck Ajit Pai).
One obviously should be able to LEASE the land from the people if they intend to do something useful with it, but otherwise, you are just going to have the land accumulate in the hands of ultra-wealthy who just sit on it. It will appreciate in value since there will be fewer and fewer patches to buy, and then you have a bunch of kids from Succession acting like they own the world, since they happened to inherit it by purely winning the birth lottery.
Good question, and why not just look at the Wikipedia entry, which addresses this in the second paragraph:
>paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[6][7]
>Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by natural monopolies, pollution, and the control of commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of 'land monopoly' involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value
One argument would be that if someone doesn't have the opportunity to provide for themselves through farming then they have no choice but to work for someone else. That then means that their labor is no longer freely exchanged which is supposed to be the core of Capitalism.
However, my understanding is that Georgism generally applies its arguments to natural resources in general; it's just that land has traditionally been the most important natural resource. You could also probably extend its arguments to other forms of economic rent.
Probably that with sufficient land you can sustain yourself regardless of what happens with the outside world. Sustenance farming as a baseline of human need.
Cynically, the difference is that they don’t own much and other people do. If you’re a 19th century new-money factory owner [] looking enviously at all those old-money landed aristocrats it’s easy to see why you’d be able to persuade yourself that actually it’s assets you don’t* own rather than assets you do that should be taxed.
(Or a ruined old-money aristocrat turned novelist. Or a 21st century San Francisco tech bro who has just realised that he’ll never be able to afford a house.)
Thought experiment for readers, supposed humans magically appear on planet earth when no humans existed before, how would they go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable and fair?
A simpler version of this thought experiment would be: Given some land (say 100 acres) how would 2 people go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable, least impactful to the environment, fair, protects individual ownership, simple etc. Assume that no government or laws exists. If one can chip away at this problem, I think one will have the solution to most problems created by (but not limited to):
1)Absurdities of law.
2)Property taxes
3)Property ownership
4)Inheritance ( let say later these 2 people have 3 kids)
5)Socialism/capitalism ( these definitions vary depending on who you ask)
6)Zoning issues.
7)Common property.( roads, rivers)
8)Food production and distribution.
9) Etc...( covers innumerable other things, so Tolstoy was right in my opinion - land ownership is the root of most of the economic evil )
Gosh... I (re)read it this morning, and come across it to here. I developed an habit that I gift a book to a random person I meet on outside... at a coffee shop, or on a beach whatever. I usually choose a person that read a book and go like "hey, what are you reading?" and we talk about it... It's a great icebreaker. By the time, I happen to buy hundreds of books and decided to share them. What is the point collecting them and calling it a "library"? It eventually lead me to meet the people from all shades of life with the interesting stories.
Interesting practice. I like to read, around 2 books per month, and mostly random books (non fiction) that catch my interest. I have interests that are unrelated to one another, and due to this I find it difficult to just talk about a book to someone I know, and even more so with strangers.
I'm the same way, but I've actually found that having random interests makes it easier to talk to people, precisely because I've read from a variety of topics.
What does your schedule looks like? I have a large catalog of books which Id love to go over, but it can be very hard for me to find the time to simply sit and read beyond sitting on a plane or a bus
This story reminds me of playing the board game "Deep Sea Adventure" ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169654/deep-sea-adventur... ) with some friends. In this game you try to get as much treasure as you can from the sea bottom floor. At the same time you share your oxygen supply with your competitors. We managed to run out of air three times in a row! The final round was particularly amusing: When the players noticed that (only) one player had a chance of making it back to the surface, they made sure to use up the shared oxygen supply since they were doomed anyway.
Fun game, give it a try. Also quite educational, just as this excellent short story.
I'm glad that Tolstoy found it's place on hacker news. His Christian anarhisam and nonviolence doctrine influence basically all civil right heroes in 20 century. But it is funny how Georgisam is selected. Just wonder could it be related with high property price in bay area.
Readit News
Among the short novels wrote by Tolstoi, my personal preference is for "Father Sergius". A young prince can't support any more the royal court, so he flees outside of his world, then struggles in trying to find meaning and peace in his life.
> Tolstoy also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George
> towards the end of his life, Tolstoy become more and more occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism.
> He spoke of great admiration of Henry George, stating once that "People do not argue with the teaching of George; they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree."
Land value tax explained in 10 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
...I have never really looked into it, but I happened on a paragraph that makes it sound like it might be an approach to dealing with the problems people complain about a lot these days:
"Douglas proposed to eliminate the gap between purchasing power and prices by increasing consumer purchasing power with credits which do not appear in prices in the form of a price rebate and a dividend. Formally called a "Compensated Price" and a "National (or Consumer) Dividend", a National Credit Office would be charged with the task of calculating the size of the rebate and dividend by determining a national balance sheet, and calculating aggregate production and consumption statistics."
"Based on his conclusion that the real cost of production is less than the financial cost of production, the Douglas price rebate (Compensated Price) is determined by the ratio of consumption to production. Since consumption over a period of time is typically less than production over the same period of time in any industrial society, the real cost of goods should be less than the financial cost.
For example, if the money cost of a good is $100, and the ratio of consumption to production is 3/4, then the real cost of the good is $100(3/4) = $75. As a result, if a consumer spent $100 for a good, the National Credit Authority would rebate the consumer $25. The good costs the consumer $75, the retailer receives $100, and the consumer receives the difference of $25 via new credits created by the National Credit Authority.
The National Dividend is justified by the displacement of labour in the productive process due to technological increases in productivity. As human labour is increasingly replaced by machines in the productive process, Douglas believed people should be free to consume while enjoying increasing amounts of leisure, and that the Dividend would provide this freedom."
This website often focuses on ambition and furiously chasing one's dreams, but it's nice to have reminders that in the end, it's the small comforts and relationships we've built that really matter.
and says just the same things about comforts, relationships, and generally love, which really matter:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6157/6157-h/6157-h.htm#link2...
Or maybe none of that matters at all, since we all die alone one way or another, it's the journey and not the destination. Life is to be lived, experienced, and one could argue dying abruptly in aggressive pursuit of your dreams is ideal.
There's a common saying that you can't take your stuff with you when you die, but you can't take your memories or relationships either.
There's plenty of reasons to cultivate relationships in the present moment without justifying it by anticipating regret on your deathbed if you don't.
And there's plenty of reasons to spend this life enjoying time with yourself.
There are lessons you can learn only in deep relationships and lessons you can learn only through extended time by yourself.
I wouldn't be prepared to call a life lived in isolation and in harmony with nature a regretful life at all.
http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2891/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487337
The basic point of Georgism is that landownership is the root of most of the economic evil in the world and land should all be expropriated and held in common. (but don't want to expropriate capital or do anything to it, unlike the Marxists: Marx called Georgism "Capitalism's last ditch")
So strangely enough, it's not about greed in general, it's about land specifically.
Who determines what land is worth? In a society with property rights, the market bids up land that is undervalued according to society's current needs and expectations and bids down land that is overvalued. When not significantly hindered by government zoning policy, it is pretty good at generating more buildings where there is high demand (see Dallas, TX). If the answer is a bureaucracy, it seems like a system of price controls where prices will inevitably be wrong and misallocate assets. I'm not aware of any country that has yet demonstrated the ability to successfully set direct prices of important economic assets for more than a decade without causing huge surpluses or (more commonly) shortages. A direct price control removes all input information from the market, whereas existing price floors (minimum wages), price ceilings, and subsidies tend to create smaller scale problems.
The prices for rights of use are determined by market, but usually bundled together with prices of buildings on it.
One way to look at Georgist critique of current land system is that the rights of use are sold once but held infinitely long. If you got lucky and bought a piece of land in downtown Manhattan 200 years ago for 20 bucks, now you wouldn't need to pay anyone for granting you that ownership right. Basically land (and natural resources) are owned by people who got lucky, not by people who actually use it (such as a restaurant which has to rent it from that lucky holder). If the ownership rights were not given for infinite amount of time but reentered into an auction every, say 7 years, the allocation of land would then go to people who actually need it. It is the same economical problem as Domain Name allocation on web.
People 'own' land on paper only. The government actually owns it no matter if you are in China, Europe or United States.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0
You can use an auction.
Eg you can auction the land off to the highest bidder for a few years at a time.
But it's easy as hell to tax land and impossible to avoid the tax (just show up with cops, what the hell are they going to do, move the land? - and if they don't pay, just sell the land to someone else, although usually the aim is to collect the tax when transactions happen) So tax it. 100%. Georgism's tax suggestions go: have that 100% land tax (not property tax), have no other taxes, that's it. Also tax networks which have an inherent monopoly effect, it was also suggested by Henry George.
Nothing to do with agrarian points of view, really. Georgism was created in SF, it was most popular in NYC, and it was talking about the problems of the first properly modern cities in America and Britain.
Labor is in theory infinitely expandable. Capital is infinitely expandable. Land (and natural opportunities) is fixed in supply, so according to Georgists there is no moral argument for favoring somebody for its monopolization. It should be community owned and rights of use to it should be given out to people, priced by a market mechanism.
Labor and capital don't suffer from fixed supply or renewability so according to Georgists there is no need to prevent it from expanding, eg. by slapping taxes on it.
Georgist movement is also known as single-tax or zero-tax movement, because they advocate that there should be no taxes on labor, consumption or capital. The only tax implemented should be the natural monopoly tax (land value tax). They say it would be enough to finace government from it because there are crazy trillions of dollars parked in real estate. Real estate price is actually land value price (location, location, lovation), so only land tax would suffice and there is no need for property taxation, which is actually product of someone's labor.
Some Georgists say that Land Value Tax is not even a tax but a payment for exclusive rights of use. You pay for the service the government gives you directly, therefore it's not a tax. In this way they argue you can run a society with exactly ZERO taxes and paradoxically raise even more money than current tax system.
One obviously should be able to LEASE the land from the people if they intend to do something useful with it, but otherwise, you are just going to have the land accumulate in the hands of ultra-wealthy who just sit on it. It will appreciate in value since there will be fewer and fewer patches to buy, and then you have a bunch of kids from Succession acting like they own the world, since they happened to inherit it by purely winning the birth lottery.
>paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.[6][7]
>Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by natural monopolies, pollution, and the control of commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g., intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of 'land monopoly' involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value
However, my understanding is that Georgism generally applies its arguments to natural resources in general; it's just that land has traditionally been the most important natural resource. You could also probably extend its arguments to other forms of economic rent.
Deleted Comment
(Or a ruined old-money aristocrat turned novelist. Or a 21st century San Francisco tech bro who has just realised that he’ll never be able to afford a house.)
Deleted Comment
Thought experiment for readers, supposed humans magically appear on planet earth when no humans existed before, how would they go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable and fair?
A simpler version of this thought experiment would be: Given some land (say 100 acres) how would 2 people go about utilizing the land in a manner that is peaceful, sustainable, least impactful to the environment, fair, protects individual ownership, simple etc. Assume that no government or laws exists. If one can chip away at this problem, I think one will have the solution to most problems created by (but not limited to):
1)Absurdities of law.
2)Property taxes
3)Property ownership
4)Inheritance ( let say later these 2 people have 3 kids)
5)Socialism/capitalism ( these definitions vary depending on who you ask)
6)Zoning issues.
7)Common property.( roads, rivers)
8)Food production and distribution.
9) Etc...( covers innumerable other things, so Tolstoy was right in my opinion - land ownership is the root of most of the economic evil )
What does your schedule looks like? I have a large catalog of books which Id love to go over, but it can be very hard for me to find the time to simply sit and read beyond sitting on a plane or a bus
Fun game, give it a try. Also quite educational, just as this excellent short story.
It teaches the concept of "good is good enough" and the consequences of greed.