Land: The $180T “Trap” Steering Everything
Think of land as the OG asset—worth around $180 trillion—and quietly running our credit cycles, politics, and even who gets to build what (and where). Host Mike Bird digs into why superstar cities keep choking off new housing, how mortgages turned banks into land‐collateral factories, and why the ghost of Japan’s 1980s real‐estate super‐bubble still haunts China’s managed deflation today. From Babylonian stone ledgers to today’s cadastres, we trace how property records, land-backed money experiments, and early U.S. land banks shaped the way we buy, sell, and tax dirt.
Escaping the Trap
The fix isn’t magic but a combo of common-sense tweaks: build where people actually want to live, deepen capital markets so homes aren’t everyone’s only savings vehicle, and capture land-value uplift to fund infrastructure (think smarter plats, not just fatter mortgages). Sprinkle in a dash of Georgist land taxes, and you might just pry open the “land trap” that’s been pinning us all down.
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