Land: The $180 Trillion Asset That Runs the World | Mike Bird, The Economist
Land isn’t just dirt under buildings—it’s the world’s oldest, strangest asset, worth an estimated $180T, quietly steering credit cycles, politics, and who gets to build the future. Economist editor and Money Talks host Mike Bird joins us to decode the “land trap”: why superstar cities underbuild, how mortgages turned banks into land-collateral machines, and what Japan’s 1980s super-bubble can (and can’t) teach us about China’s managed deflation today. We trace ownership from Babylonian stone ledgers to modern cadastres, ask whether America ever ran a de facto “land standard,” and explore pragmatic exits: build where demand is, deepen capital markets so homes aren’t the only savings vehicle, and tax land value uplift to fund infrastructure.
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Why Housing Is Unaffordable
4:20 Demand, Supply & Social Spillovers Of Housing Costs
10:31 Land As Collateral, Money & Banking
16:29 Henry George, Georgism & Early Land Reform Politics
22:22 Monopoly, Georgism’s Decline & Why Reform Faded
29:45 Policy Dilemmas: Homeownership, Infrastructure & Land-Value Capture
32:38 Land’s Scale, Uniqueness & Three Attributes
43:27 Origins Of Property Records & Cadastral Systems
49:45 Dead Capital: Hernando De Soto & Formal Property Rights
54:35 Land-Backed Money Experiments & Early U.S. Land Banks
1:00:32 Japan’s 1980s Land Boom & Aftermath
1:18:19 China’s Land Model, Three Red Lines & Unfinished Adjustment
1:26:43 Summary: Land Traps & Policy Levers
1:35:09 Lightning Round, Takeaways & Outro
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RESOURCES
Mike Bird
https://x.com/Birdyword
Mike Bird’s “The Land Trap”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/753001/the-land-trap-by-mike-bird/
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