[kiba]

I don't know what to tell you. Georgism was contemporary to the industrial revolution. The book Progress and Poverty, as described by wikipedia "investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress"[1]. That sounds especially relevant to our time.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George

So, yes. Wealth means "land". Especially so in the industrial revolution.

[ben_w]

Industrial revolution: roughly 1760 onwards if you count agricultural revolution as part of it.

Middle ages: 500-1500

Henry George, 1839-1897, is indeed part of the industrial revolution. @trashtester and I were both comparing what happened before the industrial revolution to what happened in it.

The valuation of land before still wasn't Georgism: the land was assumed to have productive output, and if someone didn't pay taxes based on the assumption, perhaps you couldn't because the land wasn't that productive, that's their problem.

And you know what else happened in the industrial revolution? Karl Marx and Adam Smith, the former placing workers rather than land at the root, and the latter placing capital rather than land at the root. As with HG, neither liked rent-seekers, and they were both more influential in the "solutions" than Henry George. (Not that he wasn't, they were just more).

Not that Henry George could possibly have foreseen even mere Earth orbitals as "land", let alone disassembling the moon into a swarm of robots that outnumber humans by more than humanity outnumbers a single human and which don't need to land on Earth which is good because if they did we'd all die just from them landing. Can't blame him for that, the difficulty seeing clearly this far ahead is why some call it "the singularity" (though I prefer "event horizon").

[trashtester]

> and I were both comparing what happened before the industrial revolution to what happened in it.

Sure. Just keep in mind that the period 1500-1760 also saw a lot of technological development that was laying the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Things like windmills, ever more advanced metallurgy, proto-chemistry, physics and so on.

In fact, some of this goes back to about 1000AD and the High Middle Ages. It was really mostly in the Dark Ages when land ownership (with subsistence farming and the military to defend it) was the source of most wealth. From 1000AD until now, land was gradually replaced by other economic capabilities as the main differentiating source of wealth. (Cities with cultures that produced skilled artisans, trade routes, naval capabilities, near-factory-level workshops centralizing production, etc.)

I suppose all I write above supports your view that land isn't currently the main source of wealth, but rather the ability to leverage skilled labor.

In the future, though, I do think there is a possibility that natural resources (and the physical power to protect them) may again become the main form of wealth, simply because the value of skilled labor may approach zero.