Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?

[Guest post by Lars Doucet - empirical follow-up; scored on the same axes.] Tackles the single most common objection: that landlords will just pass LVT on to tenants. A clean theory section (land value is a stock, land income a flow; the supply of land is fixed, so the tax can't be shifted - the bathtub-and-valve metaphor), then strong empirics centered on the 2007 Danish municipal-boundary reform, a near-ideal natural experiment (Hoj, Jorgensen & Schou) that finds full capitalization while being immune to the endogeneity problem (explained via the memorable 'planet Lars / hyperspace beast' example). Backs it with ~13 further capitalization studies and an exemplary adversarial reading of the one strongly-opposed paper (Wyatt 1994), chasing down its citations to show they don't actually support it. Closes with the practical point that simply assessing land more accurately raises the 'hidden LVT' already inside conventional property tax.

Quality 77 · Excellent. Low-Excellent: tighter and more elegant than Part 1, with model-grade epistemic practice (the citation-chasing of Wyatt), but narrower - a single question. The Denmark natural experiment is a genuinely strong piece of evidence, well explained. ~77.

Claude’s paradigm shift 44 · Moderate. Moderate, lower end. Full capitalization of land taxes is a long-established public-finance result (Oates 1969 onward); this is a clear synthesis and stress-test of existing studies, not a new idea. ~44.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. A tight empirical follow-up rebutting the top LVT objection (landlords can't pass the tax on — the fixed-supply argument plus the strong Danish municipal-boundary natural experiment), part of the Georgism corpus feeding a materially-consequential movement. Real significance via that role, but a narrow single-question brief — modest RWI.