Both Henry George in Progress and Poverty, and Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward attempted to come up with innovation ways to deal with the social problems caused by unequal distribution of wealth in the late nineteenth century.

Henry George travelled both to California and New York and noted that poverty and wealth were both more extreme in the older New York. He also noted that population pressures in both places meant that land prices were rising. This meant the owners of the land could extract more in rents without adding any value, and the people renting the land, either to farm in the west or to have living space in a New York tenement, were paying more for it. The wealth inequality was greater in New York because the land owners had had a longer period in which to extract rents. This led to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. He proposed allowing people to privatize, or keep for themselves, the earnings from what they produced or the improvements they made to land. However, he proposed that the profits from land rents and other natural resources be heavily taxed and redistributed.

Edward Bellamy was more purely socialist. He proposed getting rid of capitalist competition and private control of the means of production. Government would own the banks and factories, and the profits would be equally distributed among the people. While Bellamy said Looking Backward, a novel set in the year 2000 in which socialism had taken over, was merely fiction, his ideas became very popular.