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RSF
Biographies
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H. WILLIAM BATT, Ph.D.
Bill Batt is a political scientist who has made a living
as a university professor, staff policy analyst (on tax
policy) for the New York State Legislature, and is now
a consultant to governments and non-profit organizations.
He was the founder of the Hemlock Society of New York
(for five years serving also as a national board member)
and was its driving force and president for a decade,
stepping down in January, 1998.
He was one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers (Thailand),
has been a political candidate twice along with being
chair of the Democratic Party in Ithaca for three years),
the chapter leader of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteers
of Northeastern New York, a regular Sunday School teacher
in Unitarian Churches, and a frequent speaker on various
other topics.
He has been committed to research and advocacy for Georgist
political and economic philosophy since 1993 after an
invitation to the Council of Georgist Organizations (CGO)
conference in Los Angeles. Some of his efforts address
the implementation of land value taxation (LVT), value
capture, availability of relevant data, and the relationship
between transportation costs and land rent. Some of his
other interests are urban sprawl, the application of GIS
technology in portraying and improving land assessments,
and fiscal measures to address environment problems. He
has served on the board of directors of the Center for
the Study of Economics since 1997, and as secretary since
1999.
In the past five years he did a study under contract to
the Department of Planning, State of Minnesota, and another
of Tompkins County, New York. He is now performing analyses
of the prospects of LVT in the State of Vermont with the
support of Common Ground. Along with Bobin Jene of the
Chicago Henry George School, he explored the feasibility
of LVT in Polk County, Iowa for the Des Moines CGO conference
in September, 2000. He informally advised the office of
the Controller of the City of Philadelphia in its Report
to the city, and is acknowledged for his contribution
in the introduction. He presented two papers at the conference
of the Global Institute for Taxation at the World Trade
Center in September, 1999. His article on value capture
was published in the January, 2001 issue of The American
Journal of Economics and Sociology and included in
the compilation edited by Lawrence Moss, City and
Country published by Blackwell.
More recently Dr. Batt facilitated the translation and
printing of Progress and Poverty into Thai. He
presented two papers on land taxation at the Third Global
Conference on Environmental Taxation in April, 2002 in
Woodstock, VT. He has still more recently made two very
early Georgist works available online by dictating them
onto disk: Thomas Shearman's Natural Taxation,
and Charles Fillebrown's The Principles of Natural
Taxation, both originally published in the late 19th
and early 20th century. Dr. Batt's recent articles include
"Stemming Sprawl: The Fiscal Approach" in Sububan
Sprawl : Culture, Ecology and Politics
(Roman & Littlefield) and "Modeling Land Rent
and Transportation Costs in the United States"
in Critical Issues in Environmental Taxation
: International and Comparative Perspectives,
Vol. I (Richmond), both published in 2003.
Dr. Batt lives in Albany, New York. His email address
is HWBatt@yahoo.com
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RICHARD
L. BIDDLE
Richard L. Biddle serves as Acting Director of
the Henry George School of Social Science, Philadelphia
Extension, and the Henry George Birthplace Museum. In
2004 he became a member of the board of the Robert Schalkenbach
Foundation. He is a Philadelphia resident.
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EDWARD
H. CLARKE, Ph.D
Ed Clarke recently retired after 30 years as a Federal
Government economist and is a recent addition to the Schalkenbach
Board. Ed has a Ph.D and MBA from the University of Chicago
and an AB from Princeton University. Serving initially
as a special assistant to then Secretary of Treasury George
Schultz, Ed became instrumental in stimulating wide-ranging
(economic) regulatory reform efforts for the Ford Administration
in the mid-1970s.
Ed's subsequent Federal experience was mostly devoted
to oversight of Federal regulatory policies in such areas
as transportation and the environment with the U. S. Office
of Management and Budget.
Ed also spent 5 years as a foreign service economist,
heading a policy development office for the Agency for
International Development and also served tours of duty
in Morocco and Haiti.
Ed's interest in Georgist economics dates from the mid-1960's
where he worked on public finance/development issues at
the State and city/regional levels in such areas as local
taxation/school finance, transportation finance, and environmental
quality management.
He also developed, as a graduate student at the University
of Chicago in the mid-1960's, a process for eliciting
truthful revelations of public good benefits. The process
represented an advance in public economics that has led
to much subsequent work on "demand revealing processes",
utilizing what are known as "Vickrey-Clarke-Groves"
mechanisms.
Ed has recently published a reprint/update of his 1980
book on these processes and several related Papers incorporating
Georgist themes.
Ed lives in Washington D. C. His e-mail is edward_clarke@hotmail.com
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CLIFFORD
COBB
Clifford Cobb has been a member of the Robert Schalkenbach
Foundation board since 1997, except for fiscal year ending
June 2003. During the period from November 2000 through
July 2001, he served as the foundation's interim Executive
Director. In conjunction with Joseph Giacalone, Mr. Cobb
edited The Path to Justice: Following in the Footsteps
of Henry George in 2001. This book is based on the
Henry George lecture series at St. John's University.
Since 1994, Mr. Cobb has served as
a senior fellow at Redefining Progress (RP), a nonprofit
organization in Oakland, California that advocates alternative
methods of economic measurement and environmental policies
based on sound economic principles. At RP, Mr. Cobb developed
the Genuine Progress Indicator (a measure of national
economic welfare). He is also the author of "The
Roads Aren't Free: Estimating the Full Social Costs of
Driving and the Effects of Accurate Pricing". Mr.
Cobb and Craig Rixford published two papers on the history
of indicators in an attempt to encourage the recent "community
indicators movement" to shift from descriptive to
problem-solving measures: "Competing Paradigms in
the the History of Social Indicators" <http://rprogress.org/pubs/pdf/SocIndHist.pdf>.
With Jonathan Rowe, Mr. Cobb published
"The worst tax: how payroll taxes have hurt America's
working class" in the Washington Monthly. (The basic
thesis: taxes in the 20th century have became increasingly
regressive as they were levied on work rather than unearned
wealth.) With Mr. Rowe and Ted Halstead, he is the author
of "If the GDP is Up, Why is America Down?"
which was published by The Atlantic Monthly in October
1995.
In a previous lifetime (i.e., a decade
ago), Mr. Cobb wrote a book entitled Responsive Schools,
Renewed Communities (ICS Press, 1992), in which he
argued that school vouchers should be supported by communitarians.
He has also studied and received a master's degree in
public policy.
At present, Mr. Cobb is researching
competing Christian traditions regarding property rights
from the formation of ancient Israel through early modern
times. In addition, he is investigating ancient and medieval
conceptions of charity and justice in Europe and Asia
in an attempt to shed light on modern notions of poverty
and the legitimacy of property rights.
Mr. Cobb lives in Sacramento. His email address is cliffcobb@bigvalley.net
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GREGG K. ERICKSON
Gregg Erickson is an economist and expert on natural resource
policy in Alaska. He played a major role in designing
and implementing the Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays
annual dividends to all Alaska citizens from a fund derived
from oil revenues. He has published extensively on issues
of taxation, economic development, and management of oil
and timber. He has also held appointments to Alaska state
offices and lectured at the University of Alaska. He maintains
an economic consulting business, Erickson & Associates,
in Juneau Alaska.
Mr. Erickson lives in Juneau. His email address is gerickso@alaska.com
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TED
GWARTNEY
Ted Gwartney is the Assessor of Greenwich,
Connecticut. Until November 2000, he was the Executive
Director of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in Manhattan.
He has made nineteen trips to Russia to consult on land
valuation during the past ten years.
He has been actively engaged in land
valuation, analysis, assessment, consultation and management
since college graduation. He was the City Assessor of
Bridgeport, Connecticut; Southfield, Michigan; Hartford,
Connecticut; and the Deputy County Assessor of Sacramento,
California. In 1976 he became the Assessment Commissioner
and Chief Executive Officer of the British Columbia Assessment
Authority and implemented an annual Province-wide revaluation
of the 1,500,000 land parcels.
Additional activities include:
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Former Professor, Department of Law, Real Estate
Appraisal, Baruch College, New York;
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President, American Journal of Economics and Sociology,
New York;
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Treasurer, Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic
Trends, New York;
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Director, Land & Public Welfare Foundation, Saint
Petersburg, Russia;
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Professional Designation, Appraisal Institute, Chicago.
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Advisor, Council of Georgist Organizations.
His recent articles include:
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"A Free Market Strategy to Reduce Sprawl,"
Hartland Institute, 2000, Chicago
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"An Alternative Source for Public Finance,"
Global Institute for Taxation, 1999, New York;
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"Methods of Land Appraisal," 1999, New
York;
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"Principals for Rent Assessment," October
1997, Moscow;
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"Financing Ecological Preservation and Renewal,"
June 1995, Saint Petersburg.
Mr. Gwartney lives in Bridgeport.
His email address is tgwartney@aol.com
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BENJAMIN HOWELLS
Benjamin Howells was trained in engineering and physics.
He worked for Bell Labs for 30 years, retiring in 1990.
In 1970-71, Mr. Howells served on the Mayor of Allentown's
advisory committee on tax reform. He became keenly interested
in tax structures and land valuation. Starting in 1974,
he was elected five times to the Allentown City Council,
and was several times the President. Before the end of
his fifth term in 1991, he resigned from City Council
to become the City of Allentown Municipal Planner, in
which position he served until 1994.
Early in his tenure on City Council, in collaboration
with Leo Fetzer, then business administrator for Allentown,
Mr. Howells put together a proposal authorizing two-rate
property taxation. The Council passed the authorization
seven times, only to have it vetoed by the Mayor.
In 1994, the Council requested and the electorate approved
a charter reform commission. The commission added two-rate
taxation to the charter, which was passed by the electorate
in 1995. The Fairgrounds Association, the largest holder
of vacant land in Allentown, challenged the charter amendment
by running a referendum, which was narrowly defeated.
Mr. Howells believes he can already see increased economic
activity in Allentown three years after the charter amendment
went into effect.
Mr. Howells is currently running for Commissioner of Lehigh
County, which includes Allentown. He lives in Allentown
with his wife, Ellen. They have three children and two
grandchildren. His email address is benandellen@rcn.com.
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FRANCIS K. PEDDLE, Ph.D.
Francis Peddle is currently Director of Research for the
Canadian Research Committee on Taxation (CRCT) and Treasurer
of the Henry George Foundation of Canada. He received
his doctorate in philosophy from Boston University in
1983 and is at present a part-time professor of philosophy
at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology in
Ottawa. His publications in this area are primarily focused
on the history of philosophy, philosophy of history, ethics
and the philosophy of civilization.
Dr. Peddle is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada.
He operates a law firm in Ottawa which concentrates on
income tax litigation and property tax appeals. He has
appeared at many levels of courts including Ontario's
Superior Court of Justice, the Assessment Review Board,
the Ontario Municipal Board, the Tax Court of Canada and
the Federal Court of Appeal.
As Director of Research for the CRCT, Dr. Peddle has made
numerous presentations before various governmental tax
commissions and finance committees. His latest report
is a land value tax impact study of the City of Montreal,
significant portions of which were adopted by the Bedard
Commission (April, 1999). Two recent books authored by
Dr. Peddle are Cities and Greed and Henry
George and the End of Tax Commissions.
Dr. Peddle lives in Ottawa. His email address is fpeddle@bellnet.ca
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HEATHER TREXLER REMOFF, Ph.D.
Heather
Remoff received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Rutgers
University in 1980. Both her M.A., from the University
of Missouri at Kansas City, and her B.A., from the Pennsylvania
State University, are in Sociology. She has published
two books of non-fiction and is currently working on a
fantasy trilogy with a Georgist theme.
Heather Remoff lives in Eagles Mere, PA with her husband,
Gene. Her email address is htr@epix.net
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MATTHEW
STILLMAN
Matthew Stillman works professionally in cable television
production and development. He worked for Food Network
for five years and developed some of their hit shows like
Iron Chef and Good Eats. Additionally he has worked for
numerous other cable networks and productions hopefully
making their television shows better.
Matthew first encountered Henry George when he had to
write an economics paper as a junior at Stuyvesant High
School in New York City. The book his father told him
to read and write about was Progress and Poverty. This
event was remarkable in two ways: It made a huge life-long
impact on Matthew in its simplicity and with its pure
and just philosophical underpinnings; and it was probably
one of the few things that Matthew did during his teen
years that his father suggested.
Matthew’s father was and is a member of The School
of Practical Philosophy in New York City, and Matthew
has become a life-long student. The School of Practical
Philosophy is the sister school to The School of Economic
Science in London that was founded right after World War
II by Leon MacLaren, an adherent of Henry George. In his
search to truly understand the principles of economics
MacLaren came to the realization that one had to first
know the nature of Man. So the School continued with the
study of economics even as it turned towards the study
of philosophy.
While he has always been interested in economics and justice
avocationally, the ember of Matthew’s interest remained
unfanned until the early Spring of 2003. In a matter of
weeks after writing casual letters to the Howard Dean
presidential campaign and the Comptroller’s office
of New York City about Henry George and the possible implementation
and benefits of a Land Value Tax on national scale (for
Dean) and to help the flagging New York City economy,
he got interested responses back from each. Having been
thrown out of the philosophic purity of George into the
deep end of applied Georgism, he made contact with other
Georgists and the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, the
same organization that gave him pamphlets about Henry
George fifteen years earlier. While Howard Dean's campaign
went the way of all flesh, Matthew continues to meet with
New York City officials pressing for some version of a
Land Value Tax.
Matthew lives in Harlem, New York City, with is wife Susan.
He can be reached at mstillman@gmail.com.
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MARK A. SULLIVAN
Mark Sullivan is Secretary and Administrative Director
of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. He joined the
RSF Staff in 1992. Prior to this, he maintained the research
library, taught classes, and edited the Newsletter of
the Henry George School of Social Science (New York).
Mr. Sullivan currently serves as Treasurer of The American
Journal of Economics and Sociology and as a board
member of the Henry George Institute. He participates
in non-profit projects in publishing, spirituality, and
the performing arts. He is a former President
of the Council of Georgist Organizations.
Mr. Sullivan lives in New York City. His email address
is msullivan@schalkenbach.org
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