• ABOUT US

    Discover our History | Learn about our Mission

ABOUT US

Financial collapse. Economic inequality. Global disruptions. Skyrocketing unemployment and poverty. Sound familiar?

This wasn’t 2008. This was seven decades before. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Henry George School of Social Sciences was born. The Henry George School was founded in 1932 as part of a reform movement that sought to establish fundamental economic justice and sustainable prosperity for all. The movement’s primary goal was to bring about the land value tax or single tax advocated by George in his classic work, Progress and Poverty. This book, spurred by an even earlier period of economic and social upheaval, remains the all-time bestselling book on political economy. Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey and Albert Einstein were among the influentials who endorsed George’s proposals.

Since the school’s founding, tens of thousands of students have taken courses and attended seminars in economics and social philosophy. The Henry George School remains dedicated to its founding principles:

  • Educate people about the philosophies of visionary economist Henry George
  • Explain the importance of these philosophies in the global landscape of the 21st century
  • Explore the economic issues of today’s world
  • Encourage and promote economic and social justice

MISSION STATEMENT

The primary mission of our school is to educate the public on the intellectual legacy of Henry George, a pioneering political economist and reformer, to create a more productive national economy that encourages inclusive prosperity.

“Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting … but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas.” Henry George, New York, 1883

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

  • Susan Schuyler, President
    • Ms. Schuyler was an advertising sales director and spent her career working for several national magazines and their website entities. Prior to the advertising industry, she was the Head of the Department of Foreign Languages in public and private schools. Read more…
  • Mary Hardin, 1st Vice President
    • Mary R. Hardin brings a diverse background as a practicing real estate attorney, developer and not-for-profit board member to the Henry George School. Her work in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area includes land use issues, tax-incentive financing, creation of model enabling legislation for the country’s first business improvement districts, and not-for-profit governance. Read more…
  • Denise J. Favorule, 2nd Vice President
    • Denise Favorule is an officer and member of the Henry George School of Social Science Board of Directors; and an associate real estate broker with the Corcoran Group, a top real estate brokerage agency for NYC. For more than two decades, Denise has been a sales and marketing executive in New York City and has strong track record as a successful negotiator and dealmaker for an extensive network of client partners. Read more…
  • Gilbert Herman, Treasurer
    • Gilbert Herman is a retired Information Technology professional whose 32-year career has been in programming, systems programming, computer security, management and consulting. Read more…
  • Jeffrey Previdi, Secretary
    • Jeffrey J. Previdi began serving as a member of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) on July 1, 2016 and was appointed to serve as vice chairman effective July 1, 2017. Previously, Mr. Previdi served in a variety of roles for more than two decades at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. Read more…
  • James Cusick
    • James Cusick is an interdisciplinary applied researcher specializing in Software Engineering, Cybersecurity, History of Science, and Political Economy. Currently James is an Independent IT Consultant based in Japan and New York City. Read more…
  • Dr. Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan
    • Dr. Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan is Henry George Chair in Economics and Associate Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and Finance of the Peter J. Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University in New York City. Dr. Gevorkyan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Vincentian Centre for Church and Society, a Research Fellow at the Center for Global Business Stewardship, and a Board Member at the Armenian Economic Association. Read more…
  • Edward Harrison
    • Edward Harrison is the managing editor of Real Vision and writer of the financial newsletter Credit Writedowns. Edward is a former career diplomat, investment banker and technology executive with over thirty years of business experience. Read more…
  • Prof. Edward Nell
    • Edward Nell was born in 1935 in Riverside, Illinois, graduated from Princeton and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of East Anglia and the New School For Social Research in Manhattan, where he was the Malcolm B Smith Professor and served as Department Chair of economics in the graduate faculty. Read more…
  • Dr. Martin Rowland
    • Marty is a left-of-center registered environmental engineer whose professional, academic, and personal life is dedicated to social justice. A Hurricane Katrina survivor, he actively organized for the post-storm return of low-income, African American citizens to New Orleans despite the wishes of a local, state, and federal political class who were not exclusively Caucasian. Read more…
  • Prof. Willi Semmler
    • Willi Semmler is Henry Arnhold Professor of Economics, at the New School for Social Research, New York, and was Professor at American University, Washington D.C. and Bielefeld University. He was a visitor at Columbia University, Stanford University, the CEPREMA Paris, visiting professor at La Sapienza, Rome, and Fulbright Professor at the University of Economics, Vienna. Read more…
  • Irving Starer
  • Maria Temple
    • Manages a portfolio of construction loans for the community development bank (CDB) at Bank of America. Maria is charged with monitoring portfolio risk, securing credit committee approvals, analyzing sponsor financials, testing and monitoring financial benchmarks and covenants and working with real estate developers and NYC Agencies who develop and finance affordable housing. Read more…
  • Alan Tonelson
    • Alan Tonelson is the Founder of RealityChek, an independent blog covering economics, national security, their intersection, and other public policy topics. He is also a columnist for IndustryToday.com. Read more…
  • David Adler
    • David Adler is a Senior Advisor to XA Investments on Economics. As an economic analyst and author, he focuses on illiquidity and behavioral economics. Read more…
  • Dr. Raphaële Chappe
    • Raphaële Chappe holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research, an LL.M from New York University School of Law, a Master’s degree in Comparative Business Law from the University of Pantheon-Sorbonne in Paris, France, and an LL.B in Law and French Law from King’s College London. Her research interests include the link between financial markets and wealth inequality; political economy and the history of economic thought; and the philosophical foundations of microeconomics. Read more…
  • John Choe

BOARD OF ADVISORS

  • Ron Ries
  • Colleen Woodell
  • Prof. Anwar Shaikh

HONORARY MEMBER 

  • Fryda Ossias

OUR TEAM

  • Andrada Chereches
    Executive Director
  • Dr. Ibrahima Dramé
    Director of Education
  • Kuba Dziedzicki
    Economic Researcher

Who Was Henry George?
And why does he have a school named after him?

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In the aftermath of the economically disastrous long depression of the 1870s, a California journalist named Henry George studied a distinctive dilemma of modern capitalism: the fact that progress seemed to deepen social inequality and economic instability. The result was Progress and Poverty (1879), a book that challenged widely accepted doctrines of property rights and laissez-faire. This surprising bestseller changed the way many people thought about and understood political economy.

Henry George proposed a simple solution to the problems of economic inequality and industrial depression. In contrast to others of his era, George singled out one of the most cherished institutions of liberal capitalist societies: private property in land. He called for replacing all federal, state, and local taxes with one tax on the full value of land—the “Single Tax”.

Neither a property tax nor a land tax, the single tax only applied to the socially created value of land. George understood that land values increase as a result of the location of land near schools, hospitals, businesses, and the like. Taxing only land values, he believed, would generate all the revenue needed to operate government and produce greater levels of opportunity.

His proposal became known as “the Single Tax” and those who supported it were called “Single Taxers”. The Henry George School of Social Science was founded to educate people about this visionary philosophy and how it continues to resonate from 1879 to the economics of today.

Read Progress and Poverty.
Visit the Archives of Henry George to learn more.

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Henry George’s principles. Our society. Your life. Discover it all, free.