Vancouver Book Launch

RETHINKING THE ECONOMY LECTURE SERIES

Friday, December 1st, 4-7pm

Simon Fraser University

Segal Centre Room 1430 - Harbour Centre (515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver)

www.schalkenbach.org

HENRY GEORGE- Book Launch Vol. II, Progress and Poverty

Second in a series of lectures and discussions on the The Annotated Works

of Henry George (1839-1897), an influential American economist and social

reformer. Presentations by professor Francis Peddle and Brendan Hennigan

(The Henry George Foundation of Canada).

Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty in order to identify and resolve

the great paradox of modern industrial life. How was it possible for abject

poverty, financial instability, and extreme economic inequality to co-exist

with rising productivity and technological progress? He analyzed and

rejected the widely held beliefs that poverty inevitably followed from the

laws of economics or from a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest.

George concluded that at the heart of this dilemma was how society treated

natural resources, especially urban land. He did not succumb to the panacea

of arbitrarily confiscating property or taking from the rich to give to the

poor. George argued that taxes on productive labour should be drastically

reduced.

Henry George (1839-1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and

economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late

nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879)

captures the ravages if the privileged monopolies and the woes of

industrialization a language of eloquent indignation. His reform

agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and

his impassioned prose and compelling thoughts inspired such diverse

figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill

an Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of the works of Henry

George assembles all his major works for the first time with new

introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material,

and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for

scholars and reformers.

This event also features the launch of the posthumously published

work of Roger Wilson (1933 - 2015) titled Fearann: Canada’s Land

Debacle. Roger Wilson was a lifetime Georgist and keen observer

of the role land plays in our economy. He devoted many years to

cataloguing the peculiarities, often tragic, yet pervasive, of the misuse

of land and corruptions in the land industry. This volume, inspired

by the economic philosophy of Henry George, has been edited, with

an Introduction, by Francis K. Peddle.

The Henry George

Foundation of Canada

www.schalkenbach.org