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| One Hundred
Years of Land Values in Chicago: A Review |
| [An excerpt from an
unpublished manuscript by the author, also available on-line at the
Wealth
and Wantwebsite established by Wyn Achenbaum] |
In 1933, the University of Chicago published a book by Homer Hoyt
entitled One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. This
monumental study consists in 7 chapters, of which each of the first five
describes one of the five major business cycles of the period in great
detail.
What was so outstanding about Hoyt's book was its compelling
confirmation of George's analysis, some thirty-five years after George's
death in 1897! What is even more significant is Hoyt's handling of his
data in chapters six and seven, the balance of the study. In these two
chapters, he selects some sixteen events which not only are present in
each cycle, but which occur in the same order in each cycle.
Mr. Hoyt concluded with the usual caveat: that the mere fact that this
sequence is observed this many times does not guarantee that it will
ever happen again; which is to say that we can never prove truth, we can
only fail to disprove it.
The graphic rendition of one such cycle appearing on the following page
was devised by John Monroe, the Director of the Commerce and Industry
Division of the Chicago Henry George School of Social Science. For
classroom use, Mr. Monroe had set up a large magnetized blackboard with
a large inverted "U"; the sixteen items of the figure were
described on sixteen magnetized chips, which were shuffled and
distributed along the participants. The senior author once had a class
of five company presidents; after defining the task, he never spoke
during the exercise. The individual members had sole control as to the
place on the curve where each chip belonged. It was thrilling to see and
hear the discussion and the ultimate positioning of the individual
chips. At completion, they matched precisely the historically-based
results of Hoyt. Five converts, one of whom had been the President both
of Chicago's Real Estate Board and of its Building Managers Association,
as well as a trustee of the University of Chicago, walked out of that
session.
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