LAND ECONOMICS 
Richard T. Ely 
Lanp Economics, a new branch of economic science, is a 
product of the specialization which accompanies the development 
of all sciences. New as land economics is, however, it is already 
being split up into more or less separate fields; to mention only 
two of the more obvious divisions, agricultural land economies 
and urban land economics. It is a surprising fact that land 
economics has matured so late. So far as the writer’s informa- 
tion goes, 1919 is the first year in which a comprehensive uni- 
versity course was given under the title “Land Economics,” com- 
parable to those offered many years previously in labor economics, 
banking, taxation, profits, capital and interest and so on. 
Treatment of Land in Economics. In economic treatises of 
the past we find little treatment of land as an economic concept, 
that is, as a requisite of production sharing in the income of 
society, and yet land has always been regarded by economists as 
one of the primary factors in production. Why should so much 
more attention have been given to labor and to capital and more 
recently to management or the role of the entrepreneur? It may 
not be easy to answer this question, but it is here suggested that 
the theory of rent, especially as developed by Ricardo, is largely 
responsible. This theory has gained such an influence in the 
minds of economists that it sometimes seems to amount almost 
to an obsession, from which it is extremely difficult to escape. 
This theory presents rent as something peculiar and very simple. 
All land is regarded as a single force or factor with differences in 
income yielding power. There is no discussion of the various 
classes of land with reference to their characteristics, their 
peculiar problems or policies for their utilization. One substan- 
tiation for the hypothesis, that the Ricardian theory of rent is at 
least a partial explanation of the tardy development of land 
economics, may be found in the fact that in Germany, where the 
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