[rs232]

>Dissolve land-use regulation, pay residents to allow developers to build new structures, and distort the market in favor of the renters by levying a land-value tax.

Is The Economist starting to support Georgism?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

[336f5]

Sure sounds like it:

"Or they could heed the advice of Henry George, an American follower of Ricardo who in the 1880s made the case for a land-value tax. It has many theoretical virtues. Most taxes dampen, distort or displace economic activity by changing incentives on the margins. But a land tax cannot reduce the supply of land, and it would stimulate economic activity by penalising those whose land is unproductive. And your tax base is always right there—a city lot cannot be whisked off to Luxembourg.

The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, hopes that taxing vacant lots by value will help deal with urban blight in the Bronx and elsewhere. But there are practical problems with a land tax—perhaps the largest of which is that by its very nature it hits the well-connected rich hardest. Even fiscally purist Estonia, which adopted a land tax in 1993, has complicated it with multiple bands, including an exemption for homeowners."

As criticism goes, that is so weaksauce it's a 0 on the Scoville scale.

[pc2g4d]

It strikes me that a land-value tax is the opposite of what is needed. To me, cities' great failing is that they so completely destroy the natural environment that they become inhumane and unlivable. This is largely because undeveloped land is seen as an economic inefficiency rather than as an asset. Having green spaces, undeveloped fields, and the like mixed in with the rest softens the harshness of urban life and helps the city seem like somewhere for humans rather than simply cars and concrete to live.

This is the idea of "nature deficit disorder", the idea that exposure to natural environments helps be be more happy/creative/healthy/etc. Governments should subsidize undeveloped land ownership rather than taxing it out of existence.

[roymurdock]

I'm not sure what political angles the economist has played to historically, but I find it fascinating how the death of paid-for content is spurring a decline in the quality and scope of news across the board - especially at once-respectable establishments.

When your revenue is driven by ads, which are driven by views, you are incentivized to publish inflammatory articles that play to mass-approved tropes, such as "burn the 1%" and "the police are all evil/out of control". Not to say that these pieces are unmerited, but I've observed their quantity and quality to be moving in opposite directions.

I think Bloomberg Businessweek is killing it right now. They've onboarded some of the best talent (Paul Ford, Matt Levine) and revamped the style of their publication to appeal to the young, ADD, super-exuberant tech/finance crowd (myself included). I believe they are heavily subsidized by Bloomberg's other business ventures, so this seems to be a more viable way to fund and disseminate high quality content.

[kbenson]

> I believe they are heavily subsidized by Bloomberg's other business ventures, so this seems to be a more viable way to fund and disseminate high quality content.

How are those incentives less perverse than those engendered by current funding models? I don't imagine reporting on stories that show those other business ventures ina negative light may not been seen favorably at some level of management.

[roymurdock]

I see it as the patron model, where a wealthy individual bankrolls an artist to do basically whatever the artist pleases as long as the artist paints a nice picture of the patron every once in a while.

Of course, I have no idea how closely the other branches of Bloomberg's empire tie into BusinessWeek, but from many of the articles I have read, I get the feeling that Bloomberg LP is holding off on pushing some annoying agenda until they absorb enough market share from The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, etc.

[littletimmy]

One could easily argue that given revenue is driven by ads, it is a corporate agenda that will be enforced upon people and people will be nudged towards that.