Land: The $180 Trillion Asset That Runs the World | Mike Bird, The Economist

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🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 97 minutes

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Summary

Land isn’t just dirt under buildings—it’s the world’s oldest, strangest asset, worth an estimated $180T, quietly steering credit cycles, politics, and who gets to build the future. Economist editor and Money Talks host Mike Bird joins us to decode the “land trap”: why superstar cities underbuild, how mortgages turned banks into land-collateral machines, and what Japan’s 1980s super-bubble can (and can’t) teach us about China’s managed deflation today. We trace ownership from Babylonian stone ledgers to modern cadastres, ask whether America ever ran a de facto “land standard,” and explore pragmatic exits: build where demand is, deepen capital markets so homes aren’t the only savings vehicle, and tax land value uplift to fund infrastructure. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💤EIGHT SLEEP | IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP https://bankless.cc/eight-sleep 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors --- 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 --- 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/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, so we've talked about many different assets on bank lists, but I don't think we've
0:06.4	given one asset in particular. It's due. Today, we're going to be talking about $180 trillion
0:11.5	asset. It's the asset called a land. We have Mike Bird here to talk about it. He's an editor
0:17.5	at The Economist. He's the host of Money Talks, a fantastic podcast. He's also the
0:23.2	author of the subject of today's episode of a book called The Land Trap, A History of the World's
0:29.7	Oldest Asset. Mike, welcome to bankless.
0:32.7	Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
0:34.6	All right, cool. So to write your book, I think you had to study land. I
0:38.6	enjoyed this book in kind of the history of land, and you also had to study real estate, both in
0:43.3	America and across the world, across many different countries. So I figured you'd be the perfect
0:48.4	person to ask this question. Why in the world has it become so much harder for people starting out to afford
0:55.6	a home? It's a great question. And I always think that if you were to go back like 150 years
1:03.2	or any amount of time, really, I think this is one of the questions that people would
1:08.6	struggle to understand why it hasn't been fixed, basically,
1:13.6	why there has been so little progress, especially if you go back, you know, 50, 60 years,
1:19.0	it seems a lot more difficult now that it was then.
1:24.1	So I get at this a bit in the book, and I think the basics of it are that the economic geography of the world changed quite a lot in the 20th century.
1:36.6	So let's talk about it from the perspective of like the middle of the 20th century in the US.
1:42.8	Let's start there.
1:44.1	You had a bunch of relatively productive, successful cities.
1:49.3	You had cities on the west coast, the East Coast, the industrial Midwest, where land
1:56.7	prices were all not that different from one another in the grand scheme of things. House prices
	...

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