Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress or Poverty?

• Date: 01 May 2015
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Sanford Ikeda
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12107

Jane Jacobs on Henry George: Progress

or Poverty?

By SANFORD IKEDA*

ABSTRACT. Henry George and Jane Jac obs each have devoted

followers today who remain mainly outside the intellectual mainstream,

both are iconic American intellectuals largely sympathetic to and quite

knowledgeable about how markets work, and they each challenged

the prevailing economic orthodoxies of their day. Much has been

written, pro and con, on George’s single tax and on Jacobs’s battles

with urban planners, and while I don’t directly address either here,

what I say does have implications for those controversies. In particular,

I show how and why their views on the nature of economic progress,

and of cities in that progress, fundamentally differ. I trace the difference

to George’s essentially classical approach to economics in contrast to

Jacobs’s subjectivist approach, which more radically transcends the

economics of her time.

Introduction

Henry George and Jane Jacobs each have an enthusiastic following

today. I don’t know how much overlap there is between their support-

ers, and I suspect that what I say here probably won’t do much to

increase it.

Although he has written on a wide range of social issues, Henry

George is of course best known for his so-called single tax proposal,

which argued that eliminating all taxes save that on land rent could

*Professor of Economics and Coordinator of the Economics Program at Purchase

College of the State University of New York and a Visiting Scholar and Research Asso-

ciate at New York University. His articles have appeared in The Southern Economic

Journal,The Review of Austrian Economics, and Environmental Politics, and he has

contributed entries for The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (on Rob-

ert Moses) and for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (on Jane Jacobs). His current

research focuses on the relation between cities, social cooperation, and entrepreneur-

ial development.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 3 (May, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12107

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C2015 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.