1879 · English

Progress and Poverty

Henry George

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3 selected passages and classifications

Passage 1

The effect of inventions and improvements in the productive arts is to save labor—that is, to enable the same result to be secured with less labor, or a greater result with the same labor. … [W]hile the primary effect of labor-saving improvements is to increase the power of labor, the secondary effect is to extend cultivation, and, where this lowers the margin of cultivation, to increase rent. Thus, where land is entirely appropriated … the ultimate effect of labor-saving machinery or improvements is to increase rent without increasing wages or interest. … [T]his … explains the otherwise perplexing fact that labor-saving machinery everywhere fails to benefit laborers.

Labour and mechanization Dependence, succession, and replacement human institutions · advances dependence · advances Economic and material power Scientific or empirical evidence Diminishes autonomy Institutional Civilizational Machine or artificial system Work and economic order

George locates the harm not in machinery as an autonomous agent but in land appropriation and distribution: technical gains increase rent while labour fails to share them.

Book IV, ch. III, "The Effect of Improvements in the Arts upon the Distribution of Wealth," pp. 242–243

Passage 2

And, as we can assign no limits to the progress of invention, neither can we assign any limits to the increase of rent, short of the whole produce. For, if labor-saving inventions went on until perfection was attained, and the necessity of labor in the production of wealth was entirely done away with, then everything that the earth could yield could be obtained without labor. … Wages would be nothing, and interest would be nothing, while rent would take everything. For the owners of the land, being enabled without labor to obtain all the wealth that could be procured from nature, there would be no use for either labor or capital, and no possible way in which either could compel any share of the wealth produced.

Labour and mechanization Dependence, succession, and replacement Progress and decline human institutions · advances dependence · advances Economic and material power Rights and self-government Diminishes autonomy Institutional Civilizational Machine or artificial system Work and economic order Human future and environment

The deliberately extreme automation scenario makes George's institutional claim vivid: if productive power is privately captured, labour's disappearance makes non-owners dependent on owners' discretion.

Book IV, ch. III, "The Effect of Improvements in the Arts upon the Distribution of Wealth," pp. 249–250

Passage 3

Mind is the instrument by which man advances, and by which each advance is secured and made the vantage ground for new advances. … Mental power is, therefore, the motor of progress. … [A]ssociation is the first essential of progress. Improvement becomes possible as men come together in peaceful association, and the wider and closer the association, the greater the possibilities of improvement. And as the wasteful expenditure of mental power in conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which accords to each an equality of rights is ignored or is recognized, equality (or justice) is the second essential of progress. Thus association in equality is the law of progress.

Progress and decline Labour and mechanization human institutions · advances Rights and self-government Character and human development Economic and material power Enlarges autonomy Institutional Civilizational Work and economic order Human future and environment

George rejects automatic progress: collective advancement depends on equal social relations that release human mental power for shared improvement.

Book X, ch. III, "The Law of Human Progress," pp. 503–506

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