Progress and Poverty: Why Progress Brings Poverty

Henry George was an American printer and journalist who taught himself economics while living in poverty in San Francisco.In 1879 he published Progress and Poverty, which asked one simple question: why does poverty grow as a country grows richer?

“This century has seen an enormous increase in the power to produce wealth, through steam, electricity and labour-saving machinery.It was natural to expect that these inventions would lighten the work of the labourer and make real poverty a thing of the past.Yet where population is densest, wealth greatest and machinery most developed, we find the deepest poverty and the sharpest struggle to live.

In a new settlement, where the best house is a log cabin, no one is rich, but there are no beggars either.But as the village grows into a city, some get a far easier living, while others can hardly make a living at all.It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society.Those above the point of separation are lifted up, but those below are crushed down.”

George’s answer to this puzzle, as the next parts show, was land.The book sold millions of copies and became one of the most widely read books of its century in America.