The Traditional Case

Any tendency on the part of interest to rise above the equilibrium with wages must … direct labor to the production of capital… while any tendency of wages to rise above the equilibrium with interest must… turn labor from the production of capital. (George 1915, p. 168)

Higher interest may call forth more capital/savings; lower interest, less. This is a traditional claim, with widespread support, and it has a ring of plausibility; but the evidence for the relationship is not very strong. The case is different with wages. Higher wages can reasonably be thought to call forth more hours of work, and will likely bring more workers into the labor market. However, more work does not mean less “capital.” In particular, higher wages do not mean less saving; quite the contrary. In general, higher incomes of any kind will lead to higher savings. So, George’s contention that wages and interest must move together is flawed.

The problem is that George takes it that both wages and interest are set, and that they are fixed relative to one another; then growth takes place, with no direct effect on interest, but it drives up rents, which means cutting into the surplus, so wages will tend to fall—which, in George’s view, will tend to pull interest down. Thus typically, he argues, rents will increase and wages and interest fall, so inequality will increase, and, eventually, so will poverty. But, in fact, for quite some time in the US economy rents seemed to rise right along with growth, and so did the total wage bill; interest and profits fluctuated more, perhaps, in the early era, but later settled down and grew at more or less the same rate. For a long time, from the late nineteenth century to World War II, income shares tended to remain constant or vary within fairly narrow limits. Certainly, there was no obvious tendency for the share of rents to increase, and, indeed, in conventional accounting that share has tended to decline somewhat—though Georgists regard this as mistaken. From a theoretical point of view, however, growth will increase rents if it increases differentials, but it is not obvious that increases in population will lead to a fall in earnings at the margin (especially a margin in the American frontier West). Rents and wages may both go up.

rents and real estate Reconceptualizing Ricardian rents à la Henry George and relating them to real estate securities reveal a new and very powerful linkage between the real and financial sectors, a linkage that will help to account for recent bubbles and bursts. This linkage is complex but not hard to understand: growth drives up rents, but this does not lead to the dismal results of

Ricardo, because rents do not arise from moving to poorer land. They arise from innovation and a more sophisticated division of labor. In the past, rents were normally paid by active economic agents to largely passive landlords, and the economic effects were not very large. In the case of owner-operated family farms and owner-occupied housing (very important in the craft economy and in early mass production) higher rents had no current impact but rather implied higher land values should they sell— a distant and necessarily uncertain prospect. Rents that are actually paid reduce the spendable incomes of wage and salary-earning households and tenant farmers but increase the incomes of landlords, developers, and farmers with extra acreage. Theoretically, this transfer could affect aggregate demand, but it does not seem ever to have had an important impact on it, even in full-scale mass production, with a large part of the working class living in rental units in cities and suburbs. This is partly because the payers and recipients of rents seem to have had similar propensities to consume, and partly, but more importantly, because unionized wages were normally adjusted to cover housing costs. Today’s economy is different in several relevant respects. For the most part, farming is conducted by large corporations, while real estate development for housing, shopping malls, and offices is performed by corporate entities. These in turn are financed by bonds and stock issues; in effect, today, rents are securitized. It is estimated that between 35 percent and 65 percent of all bank lending in the 17 largest economies is for real estate (Turner 2014), especially for speculation on future real estate values. It is still the case that the payment of rents by working households and businesses probably does not itself seriously affect aggregate demand, that is, the current level of overall spending. But now, an increase in rents, due to further growth, in turn raises the value of real estate, and so drives up the prices of real estate–based securities—and this will tend to lead to portfolio adjustments. These adjustments will in turn disproportionately benefit the wealthier portfolios, an effect that will tend to increase inequality, and this will likely weaken effective demand.

The rise in rents, caused by the greater pressure on fixed resources resulting from growth, will increase the value of current rental properties, thereby increasing competition between real estate and other categories of assets, which will feel pressure to improve their profitability, either by raising productivity or by lowering wage and salary costs. This will prove significant in our forthcoming analysis of financial crises.

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