Counting Bounty: The quest to know the worth of Earth (Paperback)

Counting Bounty: The quest to know the worth of Earth By Jeffery Johnson Smith Cover Image

Counting Bounty: The quest to know the worth of Earth (Paperback)

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Counting Bounty highlights a widespread blindspot: most of us overlook land and its power to twist an economy. Householders typically spend most of their budget on land without awareness. The story begins with the official and academic efforts to minimize the total worth of Earth in America. A perusal of the historical relationship between the elite and the intellectual shows that "paying the piper" is the norm, even up to the present. Using a slew of statistics and others’ research findings, this book tracks rent to its recipients, the rentiers who own much and wield power. Aware reformers can address pressing problems by tapping land value. Watching rent flow sheds light on how economies operate, why they sometimes fail, and what a society can do about it.
Jeff Smith founded the Forum on Geonomics. As editor of the news site Progress, he assimilated startling reports from all over the world, broadening and deepening his understanding of human societies. 
Product Details ISBN: 9781634242981
ISBN-10: 163424298X
Publisher: Trine Day
Publication Date: August 12th, 2020
Pages: 280
Language: English
"The vast number of references and the apt details reflects the enormous amount of expertise and time which has been invested in it." —Team PlanningTank

"Land and money are the two main elements in political economy. Jeff Smith has been digging into “the land problem” for a long time and his expertise in that subject is without question. His findings deserve a wide audience as we struggle to bring into being a more just, equitable, and sustainable world order. In this book, Smith reveals many little-known facts about things that affect our lives, particularly land ownership, the process of rent-seeking, the concentration of wealth, and the corruption of politics, education, and other aspects of society by which the one percent continue to control the general framework of public thought." —Thomas H. Greco, author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization

"All property is made partly out of natural resources that aren't 'naturally' anybody's property. The government makes them into property. It gives them to private interests for free, and they sell it back to us for money. That might be an opportunity for corruption. This book explains problems caused by the way the world's governments dole out resources to the privileged and the potential of a better resource policy."—Karl Widerquist, an American political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University-Qatar, is co-founder if the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network, has been co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2008, and co-founded Basic Income News in 2011.