Astral Codex Ten

Hagman

3 min read

Hagman

Article

Hagman is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 10, 2021 and December 13, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “from Hagman never tell us exactly why LVT fizzled in New Zealand”; “he found the Hagman citation he was looking for”. It most often appears alongside Georgism, LVT, A. R. Hutchinson.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 10, 2021
  • Last seen: December 13, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
December 10, 2021 · Original source
The source he cites is Donald Hagman's 1965 book The Single Tax and Land Use Planning: Henry George Updated, which I can find cited in a bunch of places but can't actually seem to locate. The closest I can get is this 1978 article, also by Hagman, posted to Cooperative-Individualism.org, an old school Georgist site. There, Hagman says that when the income tax was first introduced in New Zealand in the 1890's, Land Value Tax was responsible for 75.7% of the combined tax yield of land + income taxes, but over the course of the next century that figure dropped all the way to 0.5% in 1965 and 0.3% in 1970 (note the placement of the decimal point).
Inline links: this 1978 article, Cooperative-Individualism.org
Hagman isn't clear on why this is. Did land become less important, were assessments depressed, did the land tax rate just go down? What he does say is that various exemptions were put into effect and that New Zealand made some moves away from market-based valuations. So did LVT simply not work as of 1978, or was this particular implementation hobbled?
In his case study of Australia for the same article, Hagman points to too low a rate of land tax as making it hard to see the full predicted effects borne out. Maybe a similar thing was going on in New Zealand?
Open Thread 202
December 13, 2021 · Original source
2: Thanks again to Lars for his recent Georgism posts. He wants me to add that he found the Hagman citation he was looking for, and it is “a giant anti-Georgist diatribe written as an authorial self-insert fan fiction, IN SPACE, confidently expounding upon how an LVT experiment failed on the planet Mars”.
Inline links: he found the Hagman citation he was looking for