Cheating: The Human Project and its Betrayal

 Five thousand years ago, humanity made a huge mistake. The income from shared land - economic rent - was seized by chiefs and priests rather than used for everyone’s benefit. Every unfair tax, every preventable death from poverty, and every financial crash since can be traced back to that betrayal. Fred Harrison reveals the “culture of cheating” built into the foundations of modern society: how mainstream economics removed the idea of rent, and how taxing wages instead of land harms prosperity and shortens lives. With five major crises - political gridlock, environmental collapse, mass migration, authoritarianism, and uncontrolled AI - converging around 2028, he makes an evidence-based case for replacing taxes on labour with Annual Ground Rents and sharing rents between nations to resolve conflicts from Gaza to the climate crisis. Economist Fred Harrison reveals how a 5,000-year-old fraud — the private capture of land rent — drives poverty, inequality, and boom-bust cycles. His solution: replace taxes with land value charges to share nature's wealth and heal a broken world.