The failure of the land value tax
From Samuel Watling, in the new Works in Progress:
By the early 1900s, Progress and Poverty was more popular than Shakespeare among Labour MPs. In 1910, the Liberal government of Henry Asquith implemented a tax on increases in land value and undeveloped land with a view to reforming Britain’s system of property taxes.
Asquith’s gambit failed spectacularly. Britain in the early 1900s became a case study in how administrative complexity can derail land value taxation. The tax cost more to administer than it collected, and it was so poorly worded that it ended up becoming a tax on builders’ profits, leading to a crash in the building industry. As a result, David Lloyd George, the man who introduced the taxes as chancellor in 1910, repealed them as prime minister in 1922. The UK has never fully reestablished a working property tax system.
This history serves as a cautionary tale for modern Georgist sympathizers who believe a land value tax will solve the world’s housing shortages. While Georgists argue that land markets suffer from inefficient speculation and hoarding, Britain’s experience reveals more fundamental challenges with both land value taxes and the Georgist worldview. The definition of land value was impossible to ascertain properly and became bogged down in court cases. When it could be collected, it proved so difficult to implement that administration costs were four times greater than the actual tax income. Instead of increasing the efficiency of land use, it became a punitive tax on housebuilders, cratering housing production.
Worst of all, it not only failed to solve the fundamental problem with British local government – that it had responsibilities that it could not afford to cover with its narrow base – but actually contributed to the long-term crumbling of the property tax systems Britain did have.
More British DOGE
Sir Keir Starmer is abolishing NHS England as Labour embarks on the biggest reorganisation of the health service for more than a decade.
The prime minister said that scrapping the arm’s-length body would bring “management of the NHS back into democratic control” and reduce spending on “two layers of bureaucracy”.
He said the quango, responsible for the day-to-day running of the health service, was the ultimate example of “politicians almost not trusting themselves, outsourcing everything to different bodies … to the point you can’t get things done”.
Starmer argued: “I don’t see why the decision about £200 billion of taxpayer money on something as fundamental to our security as the NHS should be taken by an arm’s-length body.”
NHS England will now be brought back under the control of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and the two organisations will be merged over the next two years, leading to about 10,000 job cuts.
Here is more from the Times of London.
Chad fact of the day
Chad’s PM2.5 levels were more than 18 times higher than the WHO guideline, with mineral dust in the Sahara Desert as the primary source of air pollutants.
Here is the full article, most of all noting that six of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in India. Via the excellent Samir Varma.
Thursday assorted links
Germany fact of the day
Germany opened its doors a decade ago to nearly 1 million Syrians, taking in more than any other country in Europe. Today, some 6,000 Syrian doctors make up the single largest group of foreign-born physicians, filling vital gaps in care at hospitals and clinics from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. That is especially true in rural areas, where attracting doctors can be hard. But even in big cities, Syrian doctors now make up the majority of attending physicians at some medical practices.
Here is more from The Washington Post. Here is my previous post on Syrians in Germany.
Emergent Ventures winners, 41st cohort
Claire Wang, Cambrige, Mass. whole brain emulation.
Minji Kim, high school, Seoul, to build a running app.
Collin Juurako, Vancouver, UBC, cryobiology.
Stevie Miller, Carnegie Mellon, to write for Works in Progress, general career development.
Ruhan Khanna and Louis Merriam, WDC Sidwell high school, to decipher the Indus script.
Marwa Mattaii and Anush Mutyala, Vancouver UBC, for a student-run nanofab.
Malhar Manek, University of Chicago, Mumbai, general career support.
Lan Dao, San Francisco, a non-profit for artificial wombs.
Adam Jarvis, in support of @teortaxes, Palmerston North, NZ, and Argentina, @teortaxes trip to the Bay Area.
Ashley Mo, Toronto, and Aoi Otani, Cal Tech and Harvard, biomedical innovation.
Raahim Lone, Saudi Arabia, Eastern province, Al Khobar, background Pakistan, sophomore in high school, a query optimizer to reduce database latency.
Matt Faherty, New Platz, NY, study of the National Science Foundation.
Mehran Jalali, San Francisco, doing LIDAR of Mesoamerica.
Mark Lutter, Washington, DC, American free cities and governance.
Sulaiman Ghori, San Francisco, Khan Space Industries, self-replicating space probes.
Arc Prize, Greg Kamradt, San Francisco, measuring AI progress.
Nucleate DoJo, and Iris Sun, toward a house and other support for biomedical researchers.
Daragh Jordan, Galway, Ireland, AI to manage social media feeds.
Abe Callard, San Diego/Chicago/Japan, to make a movie about conversation.
Epoch AI, and Jaime Sevilla, Madrid and remote work, AI safety and measurement.
Again, here is the AI engine, built by Nabeel Qureshi, for searching through the longer list. Here are previous cohorts of EV winners.
The election in Greenland
Greenland’s centre-right opposition has won a surprise general election victory – in a vote dominated by independence and US President Donald Trump’s pledge to take over the semi-autonomous territory.
The centre-right Demokraatit party – which favours a gradual approach to independence from Denmark – achieved around 30% of the vote, near-complete results show…
Five of the six main parties in the election favour independence from Copenhagen, but disagree over the pace with which to reach it…
The Democratic party, whose vote was up by more than 20% on 2021, is considered a moderate party on independence.
Another opposition party, Naleraq, which is looking to to immediately kick-off the independence process and forge closer ties with the US, was on course for second place with almost a quarter of the vote.
The two current governing parties, Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) and Siumut, are heading for third and fourth place – marking an upset for Prime Minister Mute B Egede.
Here is more from the BBC.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Lydia Polgreen on Dubai and migration (NYT, a good series from her, ongoing).
2. Open Philanthrpy is starting an Abundance and Growth program.
3. New Will MacAskill project.
4. Co-Reader.
5. “One in four new recruits to the German armed forces drops out within six months of joining, according to the nation’s military watchdog who warned that personnel shortages were pushing troops “to breaking point”.” (FT)
6. Martin Casado on AGI and employment.
Visits to the Doctor, Per Year
The number of times people visit the doctor per year varies tremendously across OECD countries from a low of 2.9 in Chile to a high of 17.5 (!) in Korea. I haven’t run the numbers officially but it doesn’t seem that there is much correlation with medical spending per capita or life expectancy.
Data can be found here. 
Hat tip: Emil Kirkegaard on X.
Model this, child care vs. college costs
The cost of child care now exceeds the price of college tuition in 38 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute.
The left-leaning think tank, based in Washington, D.C., used 2023 federal and nonprofit data to compare the monthly cost of infant child care to that of tuition at public colleges.
The tally increased five states since the pandemic began. EPI’s last analysis relied on 2020 data, which showed child care costs outstripped college costs in 33 states and Washington, D.C., said EPI spokesperson Nick Kauzlarich.
The organization released a state-by-state guide on Wednesday showing the escalating cost of child care. Average costs range from $521 per month in Mississippi to as much as $1,893 per month in Washington, D.C., for households with one 4-year-old child, EPI found.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
The Curious Surge of Productivity in U.S. Restaurants
We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at more than 100,000 individual limited service restaurants across the country, we explore the potential sources of the surge. It cannot be explained by economies of scale, expanding market power, or a direct result of COVID-sourced demand fluctuations. The restaurants’ productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such ‘take-out’ customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship between productivity and customer dwell time, if applied to the aggregate decrease in dwell time, can explain almost all of the aggregate productivity increase in our sample.
That is from a new paper by
Political markets in everything, Steak ‘n Shake edition
Check it out here.
Tuesday assorted links
1. More on stablecoins going mainstream (FT).
2. Kevin Drum, one of the all-time great bloggers, RIP.
3. Bioethicists, on average, are worse than astrologers. Much worse.
4, Mark Carney wants to eliminate the consumer carbon tax and replace it with a carbon tax on imports?
5. Scott Sumner reviews George Selgin on the New Deal.
6. Some skepticism about a Microsoft quantum computing breakthrough.
Kevin Drum, RIP
Kevin Drum was one of the OG bloggers. I never met him IRL but we know from Ibelin that that is no bar to being friends. One thing I learned from Ayn Rand is that virtue should be rewarded, not just sin punished. That’s one reason why we shouldn’t wait until someone has passed to praise their goodness. I’m glad I wrote to Kevin many years ago:
Kevin,
Thanks for your excellent blogging! I am always pleased when you link to one of my posts. I appreciate the attention, of course, but especially so because agree or disagree you have always read me fairly. Many bloggers look for the weakest or worst way that a post can be interpreted so that they can score cheap points. In contrast, I’ve always seen you take on an author’s strongest arguments. I appreciate that. Knowing how honestly and perceptively you treat my posts has also made me more attentive to all of your blogging which I read daily.
Best
Alex Tabarrok
Sentences to ponder
The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration.
That is from a new and very interesting paper by Leah Boustan, et.al. You have pondered the implied policy recommendations, right?