George uses history and deductive logic to argue for a radical solution focusing on the capture of economic rent from natural resource and land titles.
[4] The Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman wrote this about the influence of Progress and Poverty: For some years prior to 1952 I was working on a history of American reform and over and over again my research ran into this fact: an enormous number of men and women, strikingly different people, men and women who were to lead 20th century America in a dozen fields of humane activity, wrote or told someone that their whole thinking had been redirected by reading Progress and Poverty in their formative years.
[6] Contemporary sources and historians claim that in the United Kingdom, a vast majority of both socialist and classical liberal activists could trace their ideological development to Henry George.
George saw how technological and social advances (including education and public services) increased the value of land (natural resources, urban locations, etc.)
This shift in the bargaining balance between resource owners and laborers would raise the general level of wages and ensure no one need suffer poverty.
You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota of wealth to the community, in ten years you will be rich!
[12] After completing Progress and Poverty, George accurately wrote to his father: "It will not be recognized at first—maybe not for some time—but it will ultimately be considered a great book, will be published in both hemispheres, and be translated into different languages.
Many famous figures with diverse ideologies, such as George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Hayek, H. G. Wells,[14] and Leo Tolstoy, mark their first encounters with Progress and Poverty as literally life-changing experiences.
"[17] In 1930, during the Great Depression, George W. Norris entered an abridged version of Progress and Poverty into the Congressional Record and later commented that an excerpt from the book was "one of the most beautiful things" that he "ever read on the preciousness of human liberty".
"[20][21][22] Frank Chodorov, a pacifist libertarian of the American 'old right', claims to have read Progress and Poverty many times, and almost constantly for six months straight, before finally accepting George's conclusions.
[26] Alfred Russel Wallace later echoed this opinion when hailing Progress and Poverty as "undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century", placing it even above Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
[30] William Simon U'Ren wrote that he "went to Honolulu to die", but that a chance encounter with Progress and Poverty gave him a sense of purpose and renewed his desire to live.
"[34] In the Classics Club edition forward, John F. Kieran wrote that "no student in that field [economics] should be allowed to speak above a whisper or write above three lines on the general subject until he has read and digested Progress and Poverty".
[37] After reading selections of Progress and Poverty, Helen Keller wrote of finding "in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature".
[38][verification needed] Father Edward McGlynn, one of the most prominent and controversial Catholic priests of the time, was quoted as saying, "That book is the work of a sage, of a seer, of a philosopher, of a poet.
"[39] Among many famous people who asserted that it was impossible to refute George on the land question were Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell.
[40] In his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes "If I were to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage ... the possibility of sanity ... where community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian".