Review of the Book:

One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago
by Homer Hoyt

Weld Carter

[An excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by the author, also available on-line at the Wealth and Want website established by Wyn Achenbaum]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.