Land Value Capture in Practice: Ethiopia's Urban Land Lease System
blog.landeconomics.org54 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago
54 points by surprisetalk 2 days ago
Glad to see the article mentions Singapore, which is perhaps a more realistic comparison point to most modern cities than Ethiopia, which is a bit of sui generis mix of desperate poverty, decades of top-down Marxist planning, and an economy that's somehow still sputtering along (at least in Addis) despite all this and several raging civil wars.
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/singapore-economic...
over the long run land-leases have proven effective e.g with Shenzhen.
the people that need the land - lease it first - develop it. if you don't develop it - you don't realize any gain from it. thereby removing speculation.
This is incredibly interesting and I wish someone made an index of all of these approaches and their nuance.
The tension of the two ideas, 1. that a babbling brook in a field that has been there for a million years and the patent absurdity of saying someone can own it. 2. that a person needs a place to call their own.
This objective fact and the following emotional motivation are under explored in the empirical space, and I really think we should make better strides in trying to measure these things.
Only "urban" land? Who owns the rest? Can no new urban land be created? Or does the government take it by eminent domain?
Ethiopia is at least notionally a Marxist state without private property, so land is held by "the people", meaning the state.
Isn’t that completely normal in most of Asia?
Varies highly from country to country. Also as the article itself points out where it offers critiques of the Ethiopian system, the details matter a lot.
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This article is clearly about Geoism; its traditional interpretation. In its essence, Geoism should be about rents, not about land specifically. Of course they couldn't have known about tech platform monopolies back then, but they are very much about rent extraction and a far greater concern than land is nowadays. I feel like such articles are a distraction and would lead to even bigger problems. Essentially prepping to dispossess middle class land owners who are the last bastion of decentralization.
It's absurd in this day and age to be discussing land rent-seeking when the cause of most of our modern problems is platform rent-seeking. Frustrating how people twist everything good into something bad; of course there was no talk of Geoism when land rents were the main problem and main mechanism of rent extraction; only now that elites have found a different way to extract rents, now it's OK to discuss the (now) lesser evil of land rent-seeking and distract away from the new variant of the problem.
You're dramatically underestimating land rent, probably well over $10t/year, total land value over $200t.
Maybe, but at least they're not depleting my access to opportunities like platform rents do! In the old days, I could still find opportunities in my social circles to earn money to cover the rents because they still had money.
Platform rents are worse because they extract wealth by centralizing awareness, centralizing opportunities and literally shrinking the pie whilst concentrating wealth for those in the middle. They prevent me from finding opportunities which would allow me to pay the rents which they extract from me and my social circle! My social circle has no money so I can't rely on them! Only way to make money is a bs bureaucratic job working for a monopolist.
It's worse, satanically worse! Mark my words, with the current approach we will be forced to go either UBI route or start charging people proportionally to their incomes using universal digital ID to check. And the 'AI taking jobs' narrative is already in place to provide a phony justification!
Opportunities are depleted systematically from the periphery. "I make my own luck" is bullshit when when the entire system is working 24/7 to ensure you don't get any! The average elite ignores more life-changing opportunities in their inbox, every minute, than I'm exposed to in a lifetime!
Literally, elite rent-seekers took all the money and now there is no more to take! The system is now trying to saddle people will useless debts! Getting them to spend it all on their useless junk (pointless gender studies university degrees, ads for their marketing/lead acquisition startups, fake magic internet money, junk bought on credit cards...)! And then forcing them into bankruptcy for a few years, move onto someone else, then when that first person's bankruptcy period is over, repeat!!! They do the same thing with shell companies; saddle them with debt, funnel the money to the beneficiary company, let the shell default on its debt, then repeat. This is the backbone of the modern economy. It's utterly insane! The system is completely broken!