Progress and Poverty

Why do we have ups and downs in the national economy? Why does poverty continue to exist while a minute number of Americans enjoy a staggering increase in their personal wealth year after year? What went wrong in a country that professes to be dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal? As timely now as it was when it was written in 1871, Progress and Poverty is an honest and fascinating look at the financial order and the increasingly distorted distribution of income and wealth of life in America. George lays out simply and elegantly what the underlying problem is and how we might solve it. HENRY GEORGE (1839-1897) was a noted American economist and founder of the single-tax movement. He first outlined the doctrine in the pamphlet Our Land and Land Policy in 1871 and later wrote the more elaborate treatise Progress and Poverty (1879), which sold millions of copies all over the world.

In this volume three very different aspects of the late nineteenth-century debate on poverty are bound together: the American Henry George's Progress and Poverty, a response by a British businessman, Isaac B. Cooke, and a description by Andrew Mearns of the reality of poverty in the world's richest city.