Today's discussion came from our archives and was recorded in July of 2023. Our talk is hosted by Ed Dodson, a long-time faculty member here at the Henry George School, who is joined by our guest Mr. Lars Doucet.
Mr. Doucet is a consultant, blogger, entrepreneur, game developer, and currently the Director of Outreach for Common Ground USA. As a consultant, Lars has been accredited with developing numerous video games and software packages, such as Defender’s Quest and Super Energy Apocalypse. He is also the founder of Geo Land Solutions, which appraises large tracts of land to better calibrate land values and taxes more equitably. Mr. Doucet recently published his first book: Land is a Big Deal, where he explores Georgist ideas, such as rent, natural resource extraction, and collectivism.
As economies move away from being mostly industrial, they grow in complexity. You’ve probably heard of financialization, the phenomenon of how finance becomes increasingly intertwined with the real economy. But this is only one layer to this growing complexity. Technology has also changed the economy, everything is becoming
digitalized as analog machines and processes become obsolete. All of this adds up to a highly complex economy that becomes increasingly hard to understand and comprehend.
Older economic models were once capable of understanding the economy in its less complex form. But as technology and the economy become more advanced, these frameworks and analyses becoming increasingly similar to the “vulgar economics” we talked about last week. These models are often linear, can’t capture human or societal behavior, and fail to predict crises.
Critics of mainstream economics, like Mr. Doucet or, most prominently, Steve Keen, advocate for a new framework for our economic models. One new method embraces “system dynamics”, a computer science and mathematical modeling technique showing how actors within complex systems, say industrial workers in a factory, interact with other fixtures or incentives in the system. Unlike other frameworks, proponents of system dynamics believe these models can better understand how feedback loops are created, how changes in incentives or behaviors lead to changes in the system as a whole, or how dynamic or evolutionary the economy is.
As a video game designer, Lars created educational games that utilize system dynamics. When observing the games he designed, Lars often noticed how the economy in the game would lead to recessions or economic downturns. With an understanding of how the system would work, Mr. Doucet would then suggest changes similar to Georgist policy that would then ameliorate the recession. This led him to better understand the importance of Georgist policy in our complex world.
Mr. Doucet earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M University in Visual Sciences.
Together, we discussed how Mr. Doucet came to his Georgist epiphany, how speculation leads to inequality and economic downturns, and how proper appraisal of land values can lead to beneficial downstream effects.
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