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Land Speculation and the Business Cycle (Georgist Paradigm)
Land Speculation and the Business Cycle - Georgist Paradigm Author:Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison Orthodox economists have been unable to identify the cause of the periodic booms and slumps which have led to large-scale unemployment and economic hardship in market economies. Fred Harrison shows how the Georgist paradigm reveals the causal mechanism, and offers an effective way of dealing with it through the tax system. He and Mason Gaffney t... more »est the thesis against the UK boom of the 1980s which led to the slump of the 1990s. They argue that sustainable growth would follow. Professor Frederic Jones applies catastrophe theory to test the hypothesis that land speculation caused the recessions in the USA, Japan, Denmark and Britain. Bryan Kavanaugh takes the Australian economy as his case study. The book is part of "The Georgist Paradigm" series, which looks afresh at the issues economists have tried unsuccessfully to solve. It draws its inspirations from the work of the 19th-century American social reformer Henry George, whose critique of the capitalist system vied with the communist critique for the support of reformers the world over until the end of World War I. For most of the 20th century economic fashion has seesawed between the extremes of capitalism and communism - demand-side and supply-side. Each addressed specific problems, but at a cost: capitalism generated great wealth, but created a gulf between rich and poor; communism abolished dire poverty, but with a loss of personal liberty; demand-side policies reduced unemployment, but gave rise to inflation; supply-siders cut inflation, but at the cost of employment. Clearly, none of these theories offers a comprehensive explanation of how the economy works. In the series, an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars explain, with as little jargon as possible, how much more efficiently and equitably the Georgist paradigm identifies policies that tackle the social, economic and environmental problems of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. The series is aimed at the student and the politically aware member of the public who are searching for a system combining equity with economic efficiency and environmental sensitivity.« less