King
Article
King is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between December 10, 2021 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “King (1977) doesn’t have a knock-down argument”; “prominent African-American figures, from DuBois to King to the Black Panthers”; “And the King took London Town”. It most often appears alongside Africa, Christ, England.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: December 10, 2021
- Last seen: August 01, 2025
Appears In
- Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
- Highlights From The Comments On “The Origin Of Woke”
- Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse
- Your Review: Joan of Arc
Related Pages
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- Africa (2 shared issues)
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- Christ (2 shared issues)
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- England (2 shared issues)
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- Google (2 shared issues)
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- Jesus (2 shared issues)
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- Richard (2 shared issues)
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- Rome (2 shared issues)
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- Scott Alexander (2 shared issues)
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- Shakespeare (2 shared issues)
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- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
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- A. R. Hutchinson (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
What happened in Denmark was an accident, but you'd be hard pressed to design a better experimental setup if you tried. A 2017 working paper by Høj, Jørgensen, and Schou, entitled "Land Taxes and Housing Prices," published at the Danish Secretariat of Economic Councils, has the full story.
Inline links: Land Taxes and Housing Prices
Backing up the exogenous claim is that, although the change came from the Danish government, it had nothing to do with tax policy. They were just reorganizing the municipal map, and the changes in tax rates were simply the result of whatever jurisdiction your area found itself belonging to the next day. As a quick example, if an area raised land taxes because they needed more money, the fact that the area needed more money could be just as plausible a cause for any observed changes as the change to the land tax rate. But if you change everyone's land taxes overnight in semi-random directions with no particular regard for the local economic or political situation, you can be more confident that subsequent changes you observe do in fact stem from that intervention.
King (1977) doesn't have a knock-down argument for or against the full capitalization hypothesis, except to point out some quibbles with the analysis methods used in prior studies (including Oates, the seminal paper). King concludes, "our knowledge of the extent of tax capitalization is very much less than is commonly supposed." One would hope King would have been more impressed by all of the studies that have come out since.
Inline links: King (1977)
5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence.
Thanks for clarifying: I think I had looked at the US News article in the same footnote, but you are correct. My apologies, I shouldn't have commented without checking again.
For clarity, I am not talking about what the law should be. I am discussing what the law is. And isn't.
The Ballad of the White Horse is a 2,684 line poem about conservatism, and it is brilliant. It has been called the last great epic poem written in English. I have not read the three dozen or so English epic poems that Wikipedia claims have been written since, so I cannot confirm the “last” part, but I can confirm the rest. It is a great poem, in both quality and size, and it is undoubtedly an epic poem. It has almost all the qualities required of an epic poem: it begins by invoking a muse (his wife), it starts in media res, the plot is centered around a hero of legend, there are supernatural visions and interventions, and an omniscient narrator. The only epic requirement it lacks is a long boring list shoved in somewhere, for which I am grateful.
Inline links: The Ballad of the White Horse
On the surface level the poem is about King Alfred the Great, a pre-Hastings Anglo-Saxon king who has the twin qualities of being both legendary and real. There was certainly an actual King Alfred who really did fight a Viking lord named Guthrum and built the foundation needed for his grandson to form the Kingdom of England. He is considered the first English king, and is the only English monarch to be given the epithet “the Great”. At the same time he is also a figure of legend. They say he disguised himself as a wandering minstrel and played the harp for Guthrum in his own camp on the night before they would meet in battle. They also say he once accidentally burned a peasant woman’s cakes, and she, not knowing he was her king, chewed him out thoroughly (I’d expand on that, but that’s really the whole legend; one of those stories told to children that seem to have no moral or point).
This ballad needs no historical notes, for the simple reason that it does not profess to be historical. All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.
According to legend5, this curse was incurred by Philip the Fair6, King of France around 1300, when he had the Knights Templar abolished and all the officers of the order burned for heresy so he wouldn't have to pay back his debts.7 From the flames, the last Grandmaster of the order cursed him with his dying breath that he would "see him before God's tribunal before the year was out" and Philip duly died within the year. His sons would follow him, and their sons, each in inexorable succession passing the crown to the next before dying in turn. The last of the Capet princes managed to make it almost fifteen years past Philip's death before succumbing to that old favorite, "unknown causes."8
It was. In the other direction. The King of France raised his levies, called up the royal knights, hired mercenaries, invited in allies. All mustered beneath the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of Charlemagne, and this massive army went to catch the English, the English backed off rapidly while looking for defensive terrain, the French pushed on, the English started planting stakes and caltrops, the French attacked - and the English massacred them.
But all these accomplishments had been won by the power of the Kingdom of France, which during the pause in the Hundred Years' War had cheerfully spent men and treasure conquering and protecting these lands for the Burgundians, allowing them to spend their treasure on paintings and sculptures and dance manuals. The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France (Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson), who at that time was seriously mentally ill21 and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Inline links: 21