Do you all think hes a good source for objective geopolitical future trends? Or, do you think he is very biased with an american centric point of view?
Pro Palestine rally in Tokyo, Japan. Palestinian, Japanese, Turkish flags.
New powers arise
In the 2020s and 2030s, three main powers will emerge in Eurasia: Turkey, Poland, and Japan. Initially supported by the United States, Turkey will expand its sphere of influence and become a regional power, much as it was during the time of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish sphere of influence will extend into the Arab world, which will have increasingly fragmented by then, and north into Russia and other former Soviet countries. Israel will continue to be a powerful nation and will be the only country in the immediate region to remain outside the Turkish sphere of influence. However, Israel will be forced to come to an accommodation with Turkey due to Turkey's military and political power.
Meanwhile, Japan will expand its economic influence to regions of coastal China, the Russian Far East, and many Pacific Islands. Friedman predicts that Japan will change its foreign policy during this time period, becoming more geopolitically aggressive, beginning a major military buildup. Friedman predicts that Japan will build military strength capable of regionally projecting power across East Asia during this time.
Finally, Poland will continue to lead its military alliance, the "Polish Bloc." Poland and its allies will be a major power, much like the time of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Now possessing substantial military strength, Poland will expand its economic influence into what was formerly European Russia, and will begin to compete with Turkey for influence in the important economic region of the Volga River Valley. Around this time, space programs for military use will begin to emerge, and Japan and Turkey will increasingly begin to develop military capabilities in space.
As a founder of Stratfor, I think Friedman can claim a place in the foreign policy establishment (whatever that means) but when I read his writing it's much more conservative than what I would expect to find in Foreign Policy Magazine. Friedman obviously has a very deep understanding of the facts, but he frequently comes to conclusions that I find surprising, and he sometimes says things that I would say are untrue or not accepted as true by most people. (some things he's said recently about what a good response to Covid would look like spring to mind) He also in his last two books has made pretty firm predictions that I wouldn't expect someone to risk their professional reputation on. You got to admire someone who is willing to make firm predictions though.
All that said, I'm not sure of what to make of him and how authoritative I should view his analysis, or what context /lens I should view it through. So what are your thoughts on Friedman?
And just as a side note - Shirley and Moishe reminded me a lot of George's parents😬
Main questions:
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When & why did enthusiasm for Georgism fade?
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Is there consensus on the performance of the Georgist experiments that were tried? Did they "work"?
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What's the closest a Georgist "single tax" ever got to adoption at the national level in any country?
Some background:
Popular book
Here's Wikipedia on how popular the book was:
> Jacob Riis, for example, explicitly marks the beginning of the Progressive Era awakening as 1879 because of the date of this publication. 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. In this respect no other book came anywhere near comparable influence.
> Progress and Poverty had perhaps even a larger impact around the world, in places such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, where George's influence was enormous. 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's popularity was more than a passing phase; even by 1906, a survey of British parliamentarians revealed that the American author's writing was more popular than Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, and William Shakespeare. In 1933, John Dewey estimated that Progress and Poverty "had a wider distribution than almost all other books on political economy put together."
Wikipedia lists major figures who said they were influenced by the book, or who said they agreed with the book's central recommendation of a confiscatory tax on the rental value of unimproved land, and it's a who's who of the 20th century: Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Clarence Darrow, Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Friedrich Hayek, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Milton Friedman, Emma Lazarus, John Haynes Holmes, and more.
Limited implementation
Wikipedia's article on land value taxation
... keep reading on reddit ➡My thesis would be that the growing power of China replaced the USSR as a mutual threat in the Western Pacific.
Friedman's 1991 thesis was that with out the USSR, Japan's security relationship with the US no longer made as much sense.
However, the 1995/6 Taiwan Strait Crisis may have changed the calculation, and led to the U.S.-Japan Joint Declaration on Security. In essence, I think it makes sense that China replaced the USSR and ... delayed? Japan's break with the US.
However, I can't find any follow-up. Did Friedman ever do a retrospective on this topic, particularly after 1996?
Here's a solid interview about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5y_2-g-0b0
