Land Ownership

“Land Power

 

By Michael Albertus

 

Basic, 336 pages, $30

 

The Land Trap

 

By Mike Bird

 

Portfolio, 336 pages, $32

 

Is acreage overrated? Land was humanity's greatest asset for almost all of history, but collectively, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting accounted for less than 1% of U.S. gross domestic product in 2024.

 

Two books provide contrasting perspectives on land. In "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies," Michael Albertus emphasizes the politics of land reform, focusing on farmland and the developing world. Farms figure in Mike Bird's "The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset," but his emphasis is on the financial perspective, particularly the real-estate bubbles that have emerged since 1990. For Mr. Bird, land is largely an asset, its value based on "what sort of activity is going on all around it."

 

The two writers' perspectives reflect their backgrounds. Mr. Albertus is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a distinguished scholar of land redistribution. He has shown that autocracies redistribute more land than democracies and that in Colombia land reform "reduced guerrilla activity" in those areas that "threatened serious violence." Mr. Bird is the Economist's Wall Street editor; he originally joined the magazine as its Asia business and finance editor. Hence his focus here on East Asian real estate.

 

Mr. Bird begins in colonial America, where the English colonists realized that their new societies "would be defined by an enormous wealth in land" and attempted to "turn land into money" through land-based credit or land-based currency. The Debt Recovery Act of 1732, we are told, formalized the "ability of creditors to foreclose on American land"; without it, lending on land would have been almost impossible. Mr. Bird cites Claire Priest's excellent "Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America" (2021), the book to read on colonial financial institutions.

 

While Mr. Bird discusses at length a failed Massachusetts land bank's misadventures with printing mortgage-backed currency, Mr. Albertus doesn't even mention the assignat, issued during the French Revolution and backed by land taken from church and crown. Instead, Mr. Albertus's discussion of the French Revolution focuses on how, "with the abolition of feudalism, the breakup of large properties, and the end of noble and clerical privileges rooted in land ownership, France ushered in a new age of emancipation and individual equality."

 

Mr. Albertus is right that the French Revolution was a "turning point in human history," not merely the event that gave us the assignat. He is right, too, about the importance of redistributing farmland. But I am less sure about his claim that, because of a growing 19th-century population, "land's connection to power became ironclad." Land and power were linked in most agricultural societies. Mr. Albertus's statement that "who held power in this world depended on the land they held" seems far truer before 1800 than afterward. The battleship and the maxim gun, not the English countryside, empowered the Victorian imperialists.

 

Mr. Albertus also argues that the struggle over land ownership has produced "racial hierarchy, gender inequity, underdevelopment and environmental degradation." Maybe. The conquest of the Americas and the use of enslaved labor for farming was indeed catastrophic for Africans and Native Americans, but Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho were the first four states to give women the vote. Farming the Amazon is still producing "environmental destruction on a massive scale" but, as Mr. Bird's chapter on Singapore reminds us, development can soar without land as long as there are strong property rights and accessible, excellent schools.

 

Mr. Bird also discusses land redistribution, from the incremental version favored by Henry George, the 19th-century American political economist, to the violent reforms implemented by Mao Zedong in China. George's "Progress and Poverty" (1879), Mr. Bird suggests, was "quite possibly the most influential piece of political writing of an entire century." George argued that the woes of the world could be solved by a single tax on land. Such a proposal might not have been Maoist in scale, but it was still land redistribution: "We shall be all the more ready to listen seriously to Mr. George," a London Times article declared, "when he desists from proposing that in order to re-establish peace and good will on earth we shall begin by appropriating the property of others." Moreover, George's single tax targeted valuable urban land far more than most land reforms.

 

Mr. Bird, like Mr. Albertus, takes a generally positive view about land redistribution in Japan and Taiwan, and he treats as a hero Wolf Ladejinsky, the American economist who argued that widespread land ownership improves the incentive to farm well. Mr. Bird notes that while "the results of the land reform programs in East Asia are the subject of a lively historical debate," they deserve some credit for "avoiding the bleak outcomes of collectivization in the countries that fell under the control of communists."

 

Mr. Bird sees these land-reform efforts "to reshape the ownership, distribution and use of agricultural land" as a thing of the past: "The combination of the agricultural transformation delivered by the Green Revolution, combined with political pressure from both the left and right, brought Ladejinsky's struggle to a functional end even before his death" in 1975. Mr. Albertus disagrees, arguing that "the same dynamics" that once "forced land to be reallocated are still present today." This difference reflects differences between Mr. Bird's East Asian perspective and Mr. Albertus's developing-world lens. Agricultural land and land reform remain a big deal in the poorer parts of the planet, but actual acreage becomes increasingly irrelevant as societies acquire wealth.

 

These geographic differences also explain why the back halves of the two books are so different. Mr. Albertus travels from Bolivia to South Africa to give us a rich catalog of land-reform efforts. A Colombian initiative encouraged gender equity with "joint titling to couples and prioritized women at risk." In postapartheid South Africa, land restitution, often with public funds and land, "contributed to restoration and reconciliation." Mr. Albertus is an excellent guide to these changing landscapes.

 

But even if we accept Mr. Albertus's view that "our lives today are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands" over the past two centuries, it does not follow that shifting land around is more effective an antipoverty tool than, say, investing in education or urban sanitation. Mr. Albertus's own work, cited by Mr. Bird, finds that "land reform actually lowered levels of human capital accumulation" in Peru and that "under certain conditions it also has the potential to stunt urbanization, wealth accumulation, and ultimately education by encouraging land reform beneficiaries to remain in the countryside and employ their children on the farm rather than migrating to urban areas where opportunities for upward mobility are greater."

 

The back end of Mr. Bird's book is a romp through the real-estate convulsions of Asia and the U.S. The author takes us back to the mountains of debt that fueled speculators of the early American republic; Michael Blaakman's "Speculation Nation" (2023) provides the authoritative treatment of that mania. Mr. Bird emphasizes that land is easy to borrow against because "it is both immobile and extremely durable." Unlike a factory built to make a particular product, land is easy to repurpose -- which makes foreclosed land easy to sell.

 

We learn that Henry Fok, "a Hong Kong real estate tycoon," provided the road map for real-estate funded urban growth in China. As Mr. Bird tells us, Fok explained to Zhao Ziyang, China's premier in the 1980s, that in Hong Kong "the government owned all of the land and funded its own capital expenditures with an extensive land-leasing program." As a result, "Shenzhen's model of financing itself" through real estate "was adopted practically wholesale from the British colony."

 

Missing from both books is a serious discussion about the connection between property rights and the value and use of land. The powers of a landowner can range from the almost full sovereignty enjoyed by a mighty feudal noble to the essentially nonexistent rights I have over the protected swampland outside my window.

 

Over the past 60 years, the nature of land ownership in the U.S. has changed because land-use regulations have increasingly limited the right to build. In 1763, William Pitt the Elder trumpeted the rights of the small English landholder: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail -- its roof may shake -- the wind may blow through it -- the storm may enter -- the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter -- all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement." That proud sentiment, linking freedom with land, feels increasingly untrue.

 

---

 

Mr. Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Human Story Has Many Plots. Glaeser, Edward.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 01 Nov 2025: C7.