Rob: So it could be one fifth of what's estimated to be the USA's value?
SB: No, that figure includes, in other words the rental value per year. It's not the same as the actual value of the land. So if you were to, if you were somehow able to sell all the land in New York City, then according to the department of finance you would get half a trillion dollars. Now of course you can't sell it without depreciating the market but let's say you were able to sell it somehow to somebody, that would be half a trillion dollars. But that's not the same as the rental value you get every year. You don't get the full amount every year. You can only sell it once. But the land itself is supposedly worth half a trillion and we think it's a trillion.
Rob: So what would be the land, what would be the rental value every year?
SB: Yeah, I mean the total value of land in US, I've seen one estimate lately which was $28 trillion but these numbers are very slippery and it's very hard to calculate because you can't market it for one thing so you can't really get a full understanding of it. But based on some cities that have been more carefully calculated then added together, it's certainly in the tens of trillions, but it's hard to say exactly.
Rob: Okay. That sounds kind of low.
SB: It is low. It probably is because we're also talking about things like location slots and airports like spectrum use on radio, radio waves a spectrum is a form of land also according to Georgists, land is not just physical terra firm, it's also any resource that is produced by nature which can't be made by man so the radio spectrum is land, the water is land, air is land. This goes back to classical economics when they define land as basically all natural resources. So it's a little bit confusing. When I say land it's really meaning all natural resources of the world. So it's actually very low in that case.
Rob: Wow.
SB: So when people calculate land values, they're talking about the other kind of land which is just locational value of actual physical property.
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