# NEEC Evaluation: Georgism / Land Value Tax (LVT)

**Scoring document — Step 1b; scored in Session 6, natively on the v2
structure; in the canonical corpus (`neec_scores.csv`) since Session 8.**
Follows Appendix H.9's submission template exactly. Scored against the
fully-specified 26-criterion v2 structure (Section 12.3, Appendix H.7v2)
rather than the legacy 25-criterion structure, since this is a new system
with no prior C1.2 score to preserve — consistent with the handoff's
explicit instruction that Step 1b systems use the v2 structure directly. Its
row was added to `neec_scores.csv` in Session 8. It has not been
independently cross-checked by a second scorer (H.9 Step 6) — flagged as
open per this project's disclosure norms (NEEC_CONTRIBUTING.md §2, Appendix
H.6).

---

## 13 [pending renumbering]. Georgism / Land Value Tax

### Overview

Georgism (also called Geoism) is the economic-policy tradition founded on
Henry George's 1879 *Progress and Poverty*: because land's value derives
from location, natural endowment, and surrounding community investment
rather than from any effort by its titleholder, that value ("economic rent")
should be publicly captured through a **Land Value Tax (LVT)** — a recurring
levy on the unimproved value of land, explicitly excluding the value of
buildings and other improvements — while taxes on labor, productive
investment, and trade are reduced or eliminated. George's own 1888
proposal paired this with a **Citizen's Dividend**: surplus LVT revenue,
after funding public goods, distributed equally to all residents. This
evaluation scores that paired system (LVT + Citizen's Dividend) rather than
LVT-as-a-standalone-revenue-tool, since the dividend is what gives Georgism
its distinct claims on NEEC's Human Autonomy and Automation Resilience
criteria — a reader evaluating a jurisdiction that adopts LVT *without* a
dividend component should not import this evaluation's scores for
dividend-dependent criteria uncritically (each such criterion is flagged
inline below).

**Evidentiary tier (Appendix H.6) — mixed, and this matters throughout.**
The land value tax mechanism itself sits in the *real-world implementation*
tier: Denmark has run a land tax (grundskyld) since 1924; Pennsylvania has
authorized split-rate (land-favoring) property taxation since 1913, with
Pittsburgh adopting it that year and 33 municipalities having used it at
some point since; Estonia has run a pure land-only tax (no building
component at all) nationally since 1993; the Australian Capital Territory
is roughly halfway through a published 20-year statutory transition from
stamp duty to a broad-based land tax, begun 2012; land value tax variants
have also operated in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The Citizen's
Dividend component also has a real precedent this paper already treats as
proven elsewhere (the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, 40+ years). But the
*combination* — LVT as a jurisdiction's primary tax base, paired with a
Citizen's Dividend, at anything close to George's original "single tax"
intensity — has never been implemented anywhere at any scale. Every real
implementation above runs LVT as one modest-rate revenue source alongside
ordinary income, sales, and other taxes. This gap between well-evidenced
*components* and entirely unevidenced *full-intensity integration* recurs
across many criteria below and is the single most important thing to
understand about this evaluation before reading the individual scores.

---

### Domain 1: Material Security

#### C1.1 Poverty Elimination Capacity: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** A Citizen's Dividend funded by LVT is, structurally, the
same kind of mechanism NEEC's existing UBI evaluation credits with 1.0 on
this criterion "at a sufficient level" — an unconditional, universal cash
transfer. Whether Georgism could reach that sufficient level is a genuine,
unresolved quantitative question rather than a settled one. On the
optimistic side, Georgist economists estimate a full land value tax could
raise on the order of 30–50% of current U.S. federal-and-state tax
receipts even at a comparatively low rate — a large enough revenue base
that a poverty-eliminating dividend is plausible in principle. On the
evidenced side, every real-world land dividend actually modeled or paid is
far smaller: a 2020s UK Centre for Basic Income model of a 1% LVT
projected roughly £55 billion annually, working out to on the order of
$90–100/month per person — a meaningful supplement, not a poverty-line
income. No jurisdiction has tested a dividend anywhere near the
"sufficient" end of this range. Estonia's, Denmark's, Pennsylvania's, and
the ACT's land taxes all run at rates well below single-tax intensity and
fund general government revenue, not a per-capita dividend at all.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a real, theoretically-grounded
mechanism of the same *kind* NEEC already credits favorably elsewhere, with
a plausible (Georgist-estimated) revenue base for a fully-funded version,
but no implementation at any scale approaching what "sufficient" would
require, and the one concrete per-capita estimate located (UK, ~$90–100/mo)
falls well short of a poverty-line-clearing amount.

#### C1.2a Wealth Building for Resilience: 0.0 (Structural Failure)

**Rationale:** This criterion asks whether participants can build a
$70,000+/20-year household buffer through the system's own mechanism — a
different question from C1.1's poverty-elimination test, and Georgism fails
it for a structural reason, not merely a scale reason. NEEC's own existing
UBI evaluation establishes the relevant precedent directly: UBI scores 0.0
here even though its C1.1 (poverty elimination) score is a full 1.0,
because "provides income but no wealth-building mechanisms... maintains
wealth-excluded underclass despite income provision" — income consumed for
living expenses is not, by itself, an asset-accumulation vehicle, regardless
of how large it is, unless specifically structured as one (a distinction
this paper's own C1.2a text draws explicitly). A Citizen's Dividend, as
George himself proposed it and as every modern Georgist proposal located in
this research describes it, is a direct annual pass-through of that year's
land-rent surplus — not a growing, held corpus the way Alaska's actual
Permanent Fund (which invests its principal and distributes only a portion
of returns) or a Public Trust Foundation's acre-equity mechanism are. The
same reasoning that sinks UBI's C1.2 applies to a bare Citizen's Dividend
with equal or greater force, independent of the funding-scale question
C1.1 turned on.

**Score Justification:** Structural failure (0.0) — the dividend mechanism
Georgism actually proposes is, in NEEC's own terms, an income mechanism
rather than a wealth-building one, matching UBI's precedent on this exact
distinction; reduced/eliminated income and capital taxes provide indirect,
generic savings-capacity improvement but not a designed accumulation
vehicle, and no implementation demonstrates $70k/20yr accumulation for a
broad share of participants.

#### C1.2b Prevention of Exploitative Accumulation: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** This is arguably Georgism's most direct point of contact
with any NEEC criterion — capturing unearned land-rent accumulation is not
a side effect of LVT, it is the entire point. The mechanism specifically
targets one well-documented, historically significant channel of wealth
concentration (land and location value capture, including the well-known
dynamic where public infrastructure investment inflates private land
values that titleholders capture without having funded the investment
themselves). This is structural, not incidental, in the same sense
Appendix H.7v2's measurement guidance asks for. However, it is also
narrow: it does nothing about wealth concentration through equity
ownership, business profits, or financial assets — all major and, in most
advanced economies, larger components of top-end wealth concentration than
land specifically. No Gini figure specific to any real Georgist
implementation exists to cite (none has run at the intensity that would
make such a figure meaningful), so this score rests on the strength of the
targeted mechanism rather than a demonstrated outcome, and is flagged
explicitly as an estimate per Appendix H.6/H.8a's disclosure convention.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a genuine, structurally-targeted
mechanism against a specific, real, named driver of wealth concentration
(closely paralleling why this sub-criterion exists at all, per Section
12.1's Integral-derived motivation), but narrow in scope relative to total
wealth inequality and unevidenced at the Gini-threshold level.

#### C1.3 Housing Security: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** LVT's core housing-relevant claim is supply-side: because
holding land undeveloped or underused still incurs the tax, LVT discourages
speculative land-banking and rewards development, and empirical work
across Pennsylvania's split-rate cities (most rigorously a 15-municipality
study by Plassmann & Tideman, and separately Banzhaf's cross-tract
analysis) finds real, measurable effects — split-rate jurisdictions show
several additional percentage points of housing-unit growth relative to
comparable single-rate jurisdictions, and the mechanism is credited with
increased construction density. Detroit's currently-stalled LVT proposal
projects roughly 97% of homeowners would see a tax cut, since most
homeowners' land-to-building ratio is far below that of vacant-lot
speculators. Against this, LVT does not directly address rental-market
stability, eviction protection, or affordability for non-owners the way a
system with explicit tenant protections or public housing does, and the
mechanism has not proven itself against genuine speculative pressure even
where implemented: Estonia's land tax, in place since 1993, did not
prevent a real speculative housing bubble in Tallinn between roughly 2003
and 2008, a finding a 2012 study attributes in part to the tax's low
effective rate.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — real, evidenced supply-side and
construction effects from actual implementations, but no direct
tenant-stability mechanism, and the clearest available real-world test case
(Estonia) did not prevent a genuine speculative bubble.

#### C1.4 Automation Resilience: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** *Dividend-dependent criterion — see Overview.* The
Georgist case for automation resilience is indirect but genuine: if
automation-driven productivity gains capitalize into land values (because
valuable locations remain scarce and desirable even as production
automates), an LVT-funded dividend would capture a growing share of
automation's surplus over time without needing to tax labor, robots, or
AI systems directly — a mechanism recent Georgist writers explicitly frame
as "taxing automation indirectly, through land." This is a real,
citable argument, not merely asserted, but it depends on an assumption
that is more secure for earlier, more geographically-tied automation waves
than for the current one: AI-era automation's capital (data centers,
compute, model weights, intellectual property) is comparatively mobile and
un-tied to specific parcels of land in a way that, say, a factory or a
distribution hub is not, so how much AI-driven surplus actually
capitalizes into *land* rather than into corporate equity, IP value, or
other asset classes is genuinely uncertain and was not something this
research could resolve with a citable figure. No stress-testing across
NEEC's 30/50/70% displacement scenarios exists for any Georgist proposal.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a real, non-trivial, and
distinctively Georgist mechanism (unlike C1.1's more generic UBI-style
reasoning), but indirect, dependent on an increasingly questionable
assumption for AI-specific automation, and entirely untested at any stress
severity.

#### C1.5 Universal Wealth Access (narrowed — access breadth only): 0.0 (Structural Failure)

**Rationale:** This narrowed criterion asks whether the population has
broad *access* to an *active mechanism producing asset growth* — access
breadth, not accumulation adequacy (that is C1.2a, immediately above) or
concentration prevention (C1.2b). In principle, a Citizen's Dividend paired
with reduced taxes on productive investment is about as universally
*accessible* as a mechanism can be — no membership gate, no employment
requirement, no means test, exactly the properties that earned Nordic
Social Democracy and cooperative systems credit under the legacy version of
this criterion. But C1.5's own text requires "not just eligibility but an
actual mechanism producing asset growth," and C1.2a's analysis above
already establishes that the dividend mechanism Georgism actually proposes
does not function as an asset-growth vehicle at all, for any participant,
regardless of access breadth — it is a pass-through income stream. Access
to a mechanism that does not itself produce asset growth does not satisfy
this criterion's own stated requirement.

**Score Justification:** Structural failure (0.0) — for the same
underlying reason as C1.2a (a design-level, not merely a scale-level,
gap), rather than an access-breadth problem; access is arguably the one
part of this pairing Georgism gets right, but the criterion requires more
than access to a mechanism that doesn't itself build assets.

**Domain 1 Total: 2.0/6 (33%)** — Two structural failures (C1.2a, C1.5),
both traceable to the same underlying finding: Georgism's Citizen's
Dividend, as classically proposed, is a well-evidenced *income* mechanism
that performs creditably on poverty- and demand-relevant criteria (C1.1,
C1.4) but does not function as a *wealth-building* mechanism on the
criteria that specifically test for one (C1.2a, C1.5) — the same
income-versus-wealth distinction NEEC's own UBI evaluation already
establishes, encountered here for a second, differently-motivated system.

---

### Domain 2: Human Autonomy

#### C2.1 Freedom from Coercion: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** *Dividend-dependent.* A modest unconditional dividend plus
reduced land/housing costs would provide some genuine reduction in
survival-based labor compulsion relative to a pure wage-labor baseline, but
at the scale actually evidenced (on the order of $90–100/month in the one
concrete per-capita modeling located), this is a marginal effect, not the
kind of step-change UBI pilot evidence shows at more substantial transfer
levels. No autonomy-survey or revealed-preference data specific to any
LVT-dividend jurisdiction was located.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — directionally correct, real
mechanism, but thin relative to what NEEC's 70%-autonomy threshold implies,
and unevidenced by any autonomy-specific study.

#### C2.2 Labor Non-Necessity: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** *Dividend-dependent.* Per Appendix H.7's own guidance, this
criterion's partial/full distinction turns primarily on *conditionality*
rather than *size* — a Citizen's Dividend, structured as George proposed
it ("share and share alike," unconditional, no means test), would clear
the unconditionality bar cleanly. What it does not clear, at any
evidenced real-world scale, is "covering 100% of basic needs" — the
transfer sizes located in this research are a small fraction of a basic
needs budget in any high-income context. A system that is genuinely
unconditional but genuinely inadequate in size does not cleanly match
either the 1.0 anchor (unconditional and adequate) or the 0.0 anchor (no
baseline security at all) — it sits in between, which is what the 0.5 band
is for, reached here by a different specific reasoning path than the
Nordic conditionality-based 0.5 anchor example, but landing at the same
rounded score.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — unconditional by design (a real
strength distinct from means-tested welfare systems), but not close to
covering basic needs at any evidenced funding level.

#### C2.3 Creative Development Opportunities: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** *Dividend-dependent, and one of the more indirect channels
in this evaluation.* Georgism does not itself reduce working hours, fund
cultural programming, or otherwise directly enable creative/developmental
time the way systems built explicitly around this goal do. Whatever
effect exists runs through two indirect channels: modest additional
disposable income from the dividend, and potentially lower land/housing
costs freeing up income otherwise spent on rent or a mortgage (per the
capitalization argument and the PA construction/affordability evidence
above). Both are real but weak compared to purpose-built mechanisms
elsewhere in the corpus.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — plausible marginal effect through
indirect channels; not a designed feature of the system.

#### C2.4 Democratic Participation: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** Georgism, as classically formulated, is a fiscal
policy — a tax-and-transfer mechanism — not a governance system. It
specifies no deliberative or participatory architecture of its own,
unlike Participatory Economics, Integral, or CCO-PTF-CIP-SZH. Every real
implementation located (Estonia, Denmark, Pennsylvania's cities, the ACT)
operates within an entirely ordinary representative democracy, unmodified
by anything Georgism-specific. The honest scoring approach is therefore to
credit this criterion exactly as this paper already credits an unmodified
representative democracy with concentrated economic power elsewhere in the
corpus (Status Quo Market Capitalism's own C2.4 score) — the same
structure, since that is precisely what every Georgist implementation
actually is layered onto, with no distinctive addition either way.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — inherits, without modification,
whatever democratic structure the host jurisdiction already has; this is
not a distinctively Georgist score so much as an acknowledgment that
Georgism does not specify a governance layer at all.

#### C2.5 Exit Rights and Mobility: 1.0 (Pass)

**Rationale:** LVT attaches to land, not to people — an individual can
relocate freely without penalty, and (unlike Nordic-style comprehensive
welfare states) a Georgist jurisdiction does not require near-universal
population participation to remain solvent; a single city, state, or
territory can run this on its own, as Pennsylvania's individual cities,
Estonia, and the ACT all demonstrate independently of what neighboring
jurisdictions do. The ACT's own two-decade phase-in, and Pennsylvania's
long history of individual cities adopting *and* rescinding split-rate
taxation without triggering any broader collapse, both demonstrate that
exit — at the jurisdictional level as well as the individual level — is
low-cost and does not compromise the system's basic function elsewhere.

**Score Justification:** Pass (1.0) — no coercive lock-in at the
individual level; demonstrated, low-consequence exit at the jurisdictional
level in multiple real cases (Altoona's 2016 reversal, five other
Pennsylvania cities reverting after 2000).

**Domain 2 Total: 3.0/5 (60%)** — No structural failures, but no clean
passes either apart from exit rights; the pattern across C2.1–C2.4 is
consistently "real, correctly-directed mechanism, evidenced at a scale
short of NEEC's threshold" — see the cross-cutting note in the Critical
Assessment section.

---

### Domain 3: System Resilience

#### C3.1 Crisis Response Capacity: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** A standing Citizen's Dividend, structured as an automatic
annual (or more frequent) payment rather than a discretionary appropriation
— the way Alaska's PFD already operates without a fresh legislative vote
each year — would continue flowing during a crisis without the multi-month
legislative delay that afflicts discretionary stimulus. This is a real
advantage over purely discretionary systems. But nothing in Georgist
design calls for the dividend to *scale up* during a downturn the way
CCO's documented 50%-during-crisis automatic increase does, or the way
unemployment insurance's eligibility-based expansion does; land tax
revenue itself is, if anything, prized in public-finance literature
specifically for its *stability* across the business cycle relative to
income tax — a genuine fiscal-reliability advantage for government
budgets, but the mirror image of a countercyclical stabilizer for
citizens, since a revenue source that doesn't fall during a recession also
has no automatic reason to rise.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — automatic, non-legislatively-gated
continuity is a real strength; automatic crisis-scaling is not part of the
design and nothing located suggests otherwise.

#### C3.2 Inflation Control Mechanisms: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** No specific inflation-control innovation is part of
Georgist theory; a Georgist economy inherits whatever monetary policy its
host country already runs, exactly the same reasoning this paper already
applies to other systems layered onto an otherwise-ordinary market economy
(Market Socialism and Stakeholder Capitalism both score 0.5 here for
materially the same reason).

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — matches the established anchor
for "no innovation beyond conventional monetary policy."

#### C3.3 Multi-Failure Resistance: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** A land-tax-funded dividend provides some continuity of
income during compound crises, since (per C3.1/C3.2) the revenue base is
comparatively stable through recessions and doesn't depend on wage income
directly. This is a modest, real advantage over purely wage- or
income-tax-dependent systems under compound stress. It is not a designed
multi-failure architecture the way federated or distributed systems
elsewhere in the corpus have.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a real but incidental resilience
property (stable revenue base), not a designed compound-crisis response.

#### C3.4 Epistemic Adaptability: 1.0 (Pass)

**Rationale:** This is unusually well-evidenced for a criterion that often
rests on projection elsewhere in the corpus. Every real Georgist
implementation located demonstrates genuine, ongoing parameter adjustment
through ordinary democratic and administrative process, without collapse:
Denmark has revised its land-tax rate structure multiple times, most
recently effective 2024 with a new statutory cap and phase-in mechanism
running through 2028; Estonia has conducted four national mass
revaluations (1993, 1996, 2001, 2022) and adjusted local rate-setting
authority over time; the ACT publishes a structured evaluation of its own
20-year transition roughly every four years and has adjusted implementation
details (e.g., commercial/industrial deferral options introduced from
2024) along the way; Pennsylvania's individual cities have both adopted
and rescinded split-rate taxation repeatedly since 1913 without any
broader system failure. This is a system whose adjustability is
demonstrated by a genuine multi-decade, multi-jurisdiction operating
record, not merely claimed.

**Score Justification:** Pass (1.0) — repeatedly and independently
demonstrated parameter adjustment (rates, valuation methodology, phase-in
schedules) across multiple real jurisdictions over periods ranging from
years to over a century, with no case of collapse-from-adjustment located.

#### C3.5 Failure-Mode Transparency: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The valuation/assessment process specifically is unusually
transparent where well-implemented — Estonia's system, for instance,
publishes mass-valuation results and provides an explicit public feedback
and correction channel for landowners who believe their parcel's data is
wrong. This is a genuine, evidenced strength specific to the mechanism's
own operation. But this transparency is scoped narrowly to the tax
mechanism itself; Georgism has no broader architecture for surfacing
externalized costs, ecological damage, or social costs the way systems
built around comprehensive monitoring do, and — as discussed under C4.3
below — the assessment process itself carries a documented, currently
unaddressed disparate-impact risk that a purely "transparent" valuation
process does not, by itself, resolve.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — real, evidenced transparency
specific to the valuation mechanism; no broader failure-surfacing
architecture beyond that.

**Domain 3 Total: 3.0/5 (60%)** — One clean pass (C3.4, unusually
well-evidenced), no failures, three partials reflecting genuine but modest
or narrowly-scoped resilience properties.

---

### Domain 4: Ethical Integrity

#### C4.1 Intergenerational Justice: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The Georgist ethical premise is explicitly intergenerational
— land is framed as belonging equally to all generations, not something
any single titleholder or cohort may permanently enclose — and LVT revenue
could fund infrastructure or environmental preservation benefiting future
residents. But no specific carbon-reduction trajectory, debt-management
rule, or other measurable intergenerational-transfer commitment is part of
core Georgist theory; the ethical framing is real but the operational
commitment is not specified.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — strong normative framing, no
specific measurable commitment.

#### C4.2 Ecological Compliance: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The anti-sprawl case is genuinely evidenced, not merely
argued: the Pennsylvania density-effect findings cited under C1.3 are
directly on point, and a "Green Georgism" line of argument tracing back
over a century (Georgist figures influenced conservation policy under both
Roosevelt presidents, per historical accounts) treats reduced sprawl and
efficient land use as core rather than incidental benefits. More directly,
an empirical panel-data study of land-use taxation's effect on
construction-land carbon-emission efficiency across 30 Chinese provinces
exists in the current academic literature, indicating this is an actively
studied causal channel rather than pure advocacy. Densification itself is
identified in recent IPCC assessment work as a significant climate
abatement lever, which strengthens the plausibility of the causal chain
(LVT → density → lower per-capita emissions) without itself constituting
direct evidence for LVT specifically. Set against this: Georgism imposes
no hard ecological ceiling or absolute-emissions constraint the way
Degrowth or CCO-PTF's carbon-tax-funding design do; its ecological benefit
is a structural side effect of the land-rent mechanism, not a designed
planetary-boundary compliance system.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — real, evidenced, actively-studied
co-benefits (density, construction-land carbon efficiency), but no
designed hard constraint or absolute-reduction mechanism.

#### C4.3 Racial and Gender Equity: 0.5 (Partial) — flagged as a genuinely contestable score

**Rationale:** This criterion sits on real evidence pulling in both
directions, and is flagged explicitly (per Appendix I's spirit) as a case
where a different reasoner could defensibly land elsewhere. In favor: a
universal, unconditional Citizen's Dividend shares UBI's own credited
reasoning here — universal provision avoids the bureaucratic
discrimination inherent in means-tested benefit systems, and some Georgist
advocacy literature argues explicitly that shifting the basis of land-based
wealth away from "protecting property values" (a phrase with a direct,
documented history as a segregationist justification) could help erode
one specific channel of exclusion. Against this: current U.S. property
tax assessment carries a well-documented, quantified racial bias — a 2020
study (Avenancio-León & Howard, Washington Center for Equitable Growth)
finds Black and Hispanic homeowners face an assessment gap translating to
roughly $300–390 in additional annual property tax burden at median home
values, rooted partly in a documented history of assessors deliberately
over-valuing Black-owned property in the past. Land valuation specifically
is harder and more assessor-discretion-dependent than combined
property valuation (see C5.1), which plausibly *amplifies* rather than
mitigates this risk absent explicit correction, and no explicit reparative
or disparity-correction mechanism is part of core Georgist theory. No
evidence was located of any real LVT implementation being evaluated for
this specific risk in either direction.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a real, credited universalist
benefit (matching UBI's own precedent) weighed against a real, documented,
quantified, currently-unaddressed assessment-bias risk specific to the
land-valuation mechanism; presented as a close call rather than a
confidently-resolved one. Under protocol 6.1 (decision D16) the call is
encoded with both alternatives, 0.0 and 1.0, and the tier is not robust to
it: at 0.0 the entry would score 13.0/26 with 3 structural failures
(Partially Adequate); at 1.0, 14.0/26 with 2 (Potentially Adequate, as
scored).

#### C4.4 Power Distribution: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** LVT targets a specific, historically significant channel of
wealth-based political power: land rent capture, and specifically the
incentive dynamic in which landowners lobby for public infrastructure
improvements precisely because they can privately capture the resulting
land-value windfall — an incentive LVT is designed to blunt, since the
windfall would be taxed away regardless of who lobbied for it. This is a
real, structurally-grounded mechanism, paralleling C1.2b's reasoning. But
it is narrow: it does nothing about corporate, financial, or monopoly
power concentration, and NEEC's own threshold here also asks about citizen
proposal-adoption rates and democratic accountability — dimensions C2.4
already establishes Georgism does not touch at all.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — a real, targeted mechanism
against one specific, well-documented channel of power concentration;
silent on every other channel NEEC's threshold names.

#### C4.5 Exploitation Elimination: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** NEEC's own C4.5 rationale names three target
relationships: landlord-tenant, employer-employee, and creditor-debtor.
Georgism speaks directly and specifically to only the first, and even
there only partially — it captures the *unearned* (land-rent) component of
what a landlord extracts, while leaving the return on any genuine
building/improvement investment untouched, and the landlord-tenant
relationship itself (rent payment for the use of a dwelling) continues to
exist. It says nothing about employer-employee or creditor-debtor
extraction; ordinary wage employment and credit markets continue
unmodified under a Georgist system.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — direct, well-targeted, but
partial elimination of exactly one of the three named extraction
mechanisms; the other two are entirely outside its scope by design.

**Domain 4 Total: 2.5/5 (50%)** — Uniform partials across all five
criteria; no failures, no passes. This domain most clearly shows
Georgism's character as a single, well-targeted structural intervention
(on land rent specifically) layered onto an otherwise unmodified market
economy — strong wherever the evaluation touches land rent directly, flat
0.5 everywhere else.

---

### Domain 5: Implementation Viability

#### C5.1 Proven Component Foundation: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The individual components are unusually well-proven for
this corpus — LVT itself has 100+ years of continuous real-world operation
across multiple independent jurisdictions (Denmark since 1924, Pittsburgh
since 1913, Estonia since 1993), and the Citizen's Dividend component has
its own 40+-year precedent (Alaska PFD) already credited elsewhere in this
paper. This is arguably a stronger multi-jurisdiction, multi-decade
component base than several already-scored systems' component foundations.
But the *specific* integration this evaluation scores — LVT as a
jurisdiction's primary revenue base, paired with a universal dividend, at
anywhere near single-tax intensity — is not merely unproven; it has been
*tried and failed* at least once in a directly relevant way: Britain's
1910 Land Value Duty (part of Lloyd George's "People's Budget"), a
serious historical attempt at exactly this kind of ambitious land-value
capture, collapsed under valuation disputes and administrative cost that
reportedly ran to roughly four times the actual revenue collected, was
never successfully resolved, and was eventually repealed — contributing,
by some accounts, to the long-term erosion of Britain's broader property
tax system rather than strengthening it. This is a materially different
evidentiary situation than Integral's "components proven, integration
merely untested" (0.5) — it is components very robustly proven, *and* one
directly-relevant integration attempt that is documented to have failed,
alongside others (Estonia, Denmark, the ACT) that succeeded at more modest
intensity.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — an unusually strong component
record pulled down by a genuine, on-point historical integration failure
at the specific intensity this evaluation scores, alongside successful
(if lower-intensity) integration cases elsewhere.

#### C5.2 Staged Transition Pathways: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The ACT's transition is a genuinely strong, currently-live
example of exactly the kind of staged, gradual pathway NEEC's own C5.2
template describes: a published 20-year timeline beginning 2012, structured
public progress evaluation roughly every four years, and specific
transition mechanics (e.g., a deferred-payment option for commercial and
industrial buyers introduced partway through). This is stronger, more
concrete, currently-operating evidence than many already-scored systems
have for their own gradual-transition claims. What is missing is any
credible *rapid* (≤36-month) crisis-deployment pathway — nothing located
in this research proposes one, and the one historical case of relatively
fast introduction (Britain, 1910, under budget-crisis pressure) is the
clearest failure case in the entire evidence set, arguably a cautionary
tale against rapid deployment specifically rather than a template for it.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — satisfies NEEC's gradual-pathway
requirement about as well as any system in this corpus, with unusually
concrete, live, ongoing evidence; no credible rapid-deployment pathway
located, and the closest historical analogue to one is a failure case.

#### C5.3 Partial and Parallel Deployability: 1.0 (Pass)

**Rationale:** Every real-world case located demonstrates this directly
rather than by projection: a single city (Harrisburg, Altoona, or any of
Pennsylvania's other adopting municipalities), a single sub-national
territory (the ACT), or a single country (Estonia, Denmark) can adopt LVT
independently, coexisting completely normally with an ordinary market
economy and with neighboring jurisdictions that have not adopted it. No
case of adoption requiring, or even attempting, simultaneous multi-jurisdiction
coordination was located.

**Score Justification:** Pass (1.0) — demonstrated, not merely claimed,
across every real case in the evidence base; possibly the single most
strongly-evidenced criterion in this entire evaluation.

#### C5.4 Political Coalition Potential: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The cross-ideological intellectual case is unusually
strong and well-documented: historical supporters span from Winston
Churchill, William F. Buckley Jr., and Milton Friedman on the right to
Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Paul Krugman on the left — a
genuinely unusual span for a single tax-policy idea. Currently: a 2026
survey by the Community Service Society of New York found majority
support for a specific pending LVT bill among both renters and
homeowners statewide; Detroit's currently-pending LVT plan is backed by
83% of a surveyed panel of 31 national economists (including four Nobel
laureates: Deaton, Hart, Holmström, and Maskin) and is projected to cut
taxes for roughly 97% of the city's homeowners. Against this: Detroit's
plan remains stalled in the Michigan Legislature despite this expert
backing, a concrete, current instance of the gap between elite/expert
support and legislative success; the broader 2026 U.S. property-tax
political environment is oriented toward cutting or eliminating property
taxes generally (Florida, Texas, Georgia ballot measures) rather than
restructuring their base toward land value, suggesting the current
political energy runs orthogonal to, not toward, Georgist reform; and
Altoona's 2016 local reversal is a direct instance of an actual
implementation later losing its political coalition.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — unusually broad and well-evidenced
cross-ideological *intellectual* support, including current expert and
Nobel-laureate backing for a live 2026 proposal, but recurring, concrete
legislative friction and at least one direct implementation reversal;
short of NEEC's demanding ≥60% current-reality threshold.

#### C5.5 Cultural Adaptability: 0.5 (Partial)

**Rationale:** The geographic and cultural spread of real implementations
is genuinely broad — post-Soviet Eastern Europe (Estonia), Scandinavia
(Denmark), Anglo-federal Australia (the ACT), U.S. municipal contexts
(Pennsylvania), and East Asian contexts with land tax variants (Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Singapore, per historical accounts) — arguably a wider
documented spread than several already-scored systems achieve. The
important caveat: what has actually been validated across this spread is
*modest-rate LVT as one revenue source among several*, not the
full-intensity, dividend-paired "single tax" system this evaluation
scores throughout. The narrower, real claim is well-supported; the
broader claim this evaluation is nominally testing is not, which is the
same evidentiary gap running through most of this evaluation and is
reflected here rather than set aside.

**Score Justification:** Partial (0.5) — broad, genuine cultural/economic
spread for the modest-intensity version actually implemented; no
validation at the intensity this evaluation otherwise scores.

**Domain 5 Total: 3.0/5 (60%)** — One clean pass (C5.3, strongly
evidenced), no failures, four partials — the domain's overall shape
mirrors Domain 1's and Domain 4's: real, evidenced, but capped short of
NEEC's thresholds by the gap between modest real-world intensity and the
full-intensity system under evaluation.

---

## Summary Scores

**Domain Totals:**
- Material Security: 2.0/6 (33%)
- Human Autonomy: 3.0/5 (60%)
- System Resilience: 3.0/5 (60%)
- Ethical Integrity: 2.5/5 (50%)
- Implementation Viability: 3.0/5 (60%)

**Overall Score: 13.5/26 (52%)**

*Explicit sum, per Appendix H.4: 2.0 + 3.0 + 3.0 + 2.5 + 3.0 = 13.5.*

*Score distribution: 3 criteria at 1.0 (C2.5, C3.4, C5.3), 21 criteria at
0.5, 2 criteria at 0.0 (C1.2a, C1.5).*

**Structural Failures: 2** (C1.2a Wealth Building for Resilience, C1.5
Universal Wealth Access) — both traceable to the single finding that a
Citizen's Dividend is an income mechanism, not an asset-building one, in
NEEC's own terms.

**Adequacy Classification: Potentially Adequate** (fewer than 3 structural
failures, per Section 8.3) — but see the framework note below; this
classification sits uneasily next to the system's low percentage score and
should not be read as implying comparable overall adequacy to this tier's
other members.

**On the canonical CSV.** This evaluation was added as a row of
`neec_scores.csv` in Session 8, after the schema update Step 1c required
(Domain 1 out of 6, Total out of 26). It was held back until then because
the schema of the time assumed the legacy 25-criterion structure, with
Domain 1 out of 5, and a partial, single-row update would have created
exactly the kind of schema inconsistency the project's scratch-before-insert
discipline exists to prevent.

---

## Final Assessment

**Key Strengths:**
- The single strongest, most direct point of contact with any NEEC
  criterion: C1.2b (Prevention of Exploitative Accumulation) and C4.4
  (Power Distribution) both credit a real, structurally-targeted mechanism
  against a specific, well-documented, historically significant channel of
  wealth and power concentration — this is genuinely what LVT is *for*,
  and it shows.
- Exceptionally well-evidenced for a system this partial-implemented
  overall: C3.4 (Epistemic Adaptability) and C5.3 (Partial and Parallel
  Deployability) both reach a full Pass on the strength of *demonstrated*,
  not merely projected, multi-decade, multi-jurisdiction real-world
  behavior — a rarer combination in this corpus than it might first
  appear, since many higher-scoring systems substitute strong theoretical
  argument for this kind of direct evidence on at least some criteria.
- C5.2's evidence (the ACT's live, published, structured 20-year
  transition) is about as concrete and current as staged-transition
  evidence gets anywhere in this corpus.
- Unusually broad, genuinely cross-ideological political and intellectual
  support, spanning from Churchill and Friedman to Russell and Krugman
  historically, and including current (2026) Nobel-laureate-backed
  expert support for a live U.S. municipal proposal.

**Key Deficiencies:**
- Both structural failures trace to one root cause: George's own Citizen's
  Dividend proposal is, in NEEC's own terms (already established via the
  UBI precedent), an income-distribution mechanism rather than a
  wealth-building one. This is not a scale problem that a larger dividend
  would necessarily fix on its own — it would require deliberately
  restructuring the dividend as an accumulating, held vehicle (closer to
  Alaska's actual Permanent Fund structure, or to a Public Trust
  Foundation's acre-equity design) rather than a direct annual pass-through,
  which is a real, specifiable design change future Georgist proposals
  could adopt but which classical Georgism as evaluated here does not
  include.
- No domain reaches even 2 of its 5 (or, for Domain 1, 6) possible
  criteria at a full Pass; the profile is dominated by Partial scores (21
  of 26) reflecting a consistent pattern — genuine, evidenced, correctly-
  directed mechanisms that fall short of NEEC's demanding thresholds
  because no real implementation has ever run at anywhere near the
  intensity ("single tax," full-dividend) this evaluation is nominally
  testing.
- C4.3's racial-equity risk (documented current assessment bias,
  potentially amplified by land-specific valuation's greater technical
  difficulty) is real, current, and — per this research — entirely
  unaddressed by any located Georgist proposal or implementation.
- C5.1's evidence includes a genuine, on-point historical failure (Britain,
  1910) at close to the specific intensity this evaluation scores, not
  merely an absence of evidence.

**A note on the adequacy-tier result, for the NEEC framework itself.**
Georgism/LVT lands in the Potentially Adequate tier (2 failures, under the
Section 8.3 threshold) with the lowest percentage score of any system this
paper has evaluated in that tier — 52%, well below the next-lowest member,
Market Socialism (16.5/26, 63%; MMT + Job Guarantee, 64% under the legacy
25-criterion count when this was written, has been Partially Adequate since
the Step 1c retrofit). This is a real, if narrow, illustration of a pattern
Section 8.3's failure-count-based classification makes possible: a system
can earn "Potentially Adequate" status by having very few outright zeros
while still being decisively mediocre in aggregate, because failure-count
classification and percentage score are measuring different things by design
(Section 10.3's whole argument for why NEEC prefers dominance/ failure-count
analysis over scalar totals). This is not presented as a flaw in the
classification system — Section 10.3 already explains why NEEC treats
fine-grained scalar rank as the least important of its comparative tools —
but it is a clean, real (not hypothetical) case worth having on record for
whoever next revisits the adequacy-tier discussion, alongside Integral's own
contribution of the first genuine Partially Adequate case. A future Appendix
I proposal arguing for some kind of "percentage floor" alongside the
failure-count threshold, or arguing against one, would have a concrete case
to reason from here rather than a hypothetical.

**Comparison to other systems in the corpus.** On the canonical corpus,
Georgism is strictly dominated by one system, CCO-PTF-CIP-SZH, and dominates
none. It scores below every other Potentially Adequate entry (Nordic Social
Democracy, Market Socialism, Degrowth Economics, Participatory Economics and
CCO-PTF-CIP-SZH) on raw percentage. Qualitatively, its profile — one sharp
structural strength (land-rent capture specifically), otherwise consistently
Partial — most resembles Stakeholder Capitalism's "narrow, real reform
layered onto an unmodified system" shape more than it resembles any
Potentially Adequate system's shape, even though its actual score and
failure count land it in the higher tier. This tension is exactly what the
note above flags for the framework's own attention.

---

## Reviewer disclosure (per NEEC_CONTRIBUTING.md §2 / Appendix H.6)

This is a first-pass scoring by a single AI reasoner (Claude), based on
web research conducted in this session rather than a systematic literature
review, and has not yet been independently cross-checked by a second
scorer per H.9 Step 6. Sources were drawn from a mix of academic papers
(Lincoln Institute of Land Policy publications, a Washington Center for
Equitable Growth working paper, a ScienceDirect article on Estonian urban
development, a China-focused carbon-efficiency panel study), government
and policy-institute material (Estonian Tax and Customs Board, ACT/Prosper
Australia transition reports, Housing Australia, Grattan Institute), press
coverage of live 2026 political developments (Detroit's LVT plan, New
York's LVT bill), and both pro-Georgist advocacy sources (the Progress and
Poverty Institute, Scott Santens) and skeptical/critical sources (Works in
Progress magazine's British-history piece, a LessWrong critique, Nicholas
Decker's Substack critique) — an attempt at genuine balance rather than a
one-sided case, but not a substitute for a formal literature review. The
clearest candidates for independent disagreement are flagged inline: C4.3
(explicitly marked contestable above), the C1.2a/C1.5 income-vs-wealth
reasoning (a real interpretive choice, even though this evaluation
believes it follows directly from NEEC's own UBI precedent), and the
overall "dividend-dependent criteria" framing choice described in the
Overview, which a scorer evaluating a different pairing (LVT without a
citizen's dividend, or LVT paired with a different redistribution
mechanism) should not import wholesale.

---

## Summary block

The machine-readable summary of this entry (protocol section 9; schema
`neec-summary-block/1.0`, `summary_block_schema.json`). It is generated from
the canonical corpus and the Session 28 staging (`summary_blocks_s28.json`),
not typed, and validated by `neec_entry.py`.

<!-- NEEC-SUMMARY-BLOCK -->
```json
{
  "schema": "neec-summary-block/1.0",
  "key": "Georgism / Land Value Tax",
  "code": "GEO",
  "display_name": "Georgism / Land Value Tax (LVT + Citizen's Dividend)",
  "record": {"documents": ["NEEC_Georgism_LVT_scoring_scratch.md"], "scored": "Session 6, natively on the v2 structure", "structure": "native-v2"},
  "scope": {"class": "mechanism", "basis": "stated", "source": {"file": "NEEC_Ostrom_Commons_scoring_scratch.md", "locator": "document", "phrase": "Commons governance joins archetype 1, narrow single-mechanism systems, as its fifth member after Georgism, Mutual Credit / LETS, Sovereign Wealth Fund Statism and Islamic finance."}},
  "vector": {
    "C1.1": 0.5, "C1.2a": 0.0, "C1.2b": 0.5, "C1.3": 0.5, "C1.4": 0.5, "C1.5": 0.0,
    "C2.1": 0.5, "C2.2": 0.5, "C2.3": 0.5, "C2.4": 0.5, "C2.5": 1.0,
    "C3.1": 0.5, "C3.2": 0.5, "C3.3": 0.5, "C3.4": 1.0, "C3.5": 0.5,
    "C4.1": 0.5, "C4.2": 0.5, "C4.3": 0.5, "C4.4": 0.5, "C4.5": 0.5,
    "C5.1": 0.5, "C5.2": 0.5, "C5.3": 1.0, "C5.4": 0.5, "C5.5": 0.5
  },
  "summary": {"D1": 2.0, "D2": 3.0, "D3": 3.0, "D4": 2.5, "D5": 3.0, "total": 13.5, "failures": 2, "tier": "Potentially Adequate"},
  "flags": [
    {"criterion": "C4.3", "scored": 0.5, "alternatives": [0.0, 1.0], "basis": "both-directions", "reading": null, "tracks": null, "source": {"file": "NEEC_Georgism_LVT_scoring_scratch.md", "locator": "C4.3", "phrase": "a different reasoner could defensibly land elsewhere"}}
  ],
  "joint_readings": [
    {"id": "scored", "label": "as scored", "basis": "scored", "resolve": {}, "result": {"total": 13.5, "failures": 2, "tier": "Potentially Adequate"}},
    {"id": "up", "label": "every flagged call resolved upward", "basis": "extremes", "resolve": {"C4.3": 1.0}, "result": {"total": 14.0, "failures": 2, "tier": "Potentially Adequate"}},
    {"id": "down", "label": "every flagged call resolved downward", "basis": "extremes", "resolve": {"C4.3": 0.0}, "result": {"total": 13.0, "failures": 3, "tier": "Partially Adequate"}}
  ],
  "scenarios": []
}
```
<!-- /NEEC-SUMMARY-BLOCK -->