A good starting point can be the relevant part of the Georgist primer published on ACX:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-part-3-c...

Distinguishing between lot value and property value is already a very common exercise in the real estate business.

Basically all of your data points are the built-up prices. So it is going to be easier to estimate the built-up value than the raw property value. Maybe not much easier, but definitely not harder.

Or maybe a tax based on more things has nothing to do with complexity. The largest market is for land and structures. That makes it the simplest to value.

This is a nightmare. Can you elaborate?

Now how do we determine that x%? That's a good question. I think there's no way out of some empiricism even if someone did try this approach. But you can always start it low and raise it incrementally to see how it affects the land economy of an area.

Why? This just seems to create yet another perverse incentive structure that people have to invest time into understanding (and some into exploiting), rather than adding any actual value. Taxes mean nothing if everyone is too busy figuring out this sort of scheme to do anything valuable.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494

> To put this problem starkly: allocative efficiency and thus an efficient market economy is impossible in the presence of private ownership.

What the paper's early pages are saying is that study A found that things could be allocated more efficiently, and study B found that sometimes people hold out from selling things now to gain more later, therefore to increase the efficiency of global (literally) allocation of resources, people should be forced to sell things or pay more taxes to keep them.

This seems to have several problems on its face, that might be dealt with later, but still:

- This is all theory. There is no global optimum to observe, no matter how many papers might be written. Only to theorise about.

- This is relative, and time-sensitive. I might value a property at X because at that moment it's worth that much to me. It might change in the future, or depend on how markets are doing. Should I instantly sell because I have an ice cream shop and people are all eating gelato, and I can't afford the tax so I reduce the valuation to a point where some shark can grab the building?

- Perfect is the enemy of good, particularly when perfect is so poorly defined. This can get a lot worse much more easily than it can get a bit better.

Think at the margin here. You're not saying you should instantly sell because the gelato/ice cream enthusiast ratio has increased slightly. You're saying everyone all at once decided en masse to start eating gelato instead of ice cream. Yes, as an entrepreneur you need to respond to that. That's an enormous and sudden change in not just the long- but even the short-term viability of your endeavor.

Indeed the forced price mechanic improves the short term responsivity of the local economy to such a change, because your scenario suggests a recent total upset in the established order of things. I would rather see you walk away today, from a venture that you realized yesterday was doomed to fail, with an extra $X in your pocket from the shark who bought you out than to see you driven to bankruptcy because you were the last ice cream boy in this mad, gelato crazed new world. Who knows -- maybe you'll start an ice cream stand in a cheaper, more sane part of the world with it.

But I'm having trouble as a result of the choice of icecream/gelato words.

I interpreted @robertlagrant to be in the "gelato is icecream" camp (which seems reasonable to me in a "baguettes are bread" sense).

But @hiAndrewQuinn, you seem to be in the "gelato is not icecream" camp. I would call this is an arguably correct position similar to "chicken tikka masala is not Indian food," but I doubt most people holding either of these positions would consider these kinds of small differences likely to be the trigger for a business becoming unviable. So perhaps you didn't know what gelato was?

In either case, I think you two need to be using the same definitions for your illustrations to make sense. And I really want them to make sense because I want to understand :)

That doesn't make any sense in the context of a land value tax.

The whole point of a land value tax is that a parcel of city center land is taxed at the same rate whether it's got a parking lot on it or an apartment block.

But the owner of an apartment block would self-assess their land as much more valuable than a parking lot, not wanting to be forced to sell their apartment block for the price of a parking lot. So you'd be back to having a property tax, not a land value tax.

But they may later find out that the parking lot isn't really worth $5 million, because it's harder to make the money to justify the x% of $5 million tax you're paying on it with a parking lot than with an apartment complex. They may then drop their valuation to $3 million, or $2 million, to reduce the total amount they pay in tax each year. But then of course they may run a greater risk of being forced to sell themselves -- perhaps even back to the original apartment runner they paid $5 million to before.