Land: The $180 Trillion Asset That Runs the World | Mike Bird, The Economist
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Okay. So we've talked about many different assets on Banklist, but I don't think we've given one asset in particular its due. Today, we're gonna be talking about a $180,000,000,000,000 asset. It's the asset called land. We have Mike Bird here to talk about it. He's an editor at The Economist. He's the host of Money Talks, a fantastic podcast. He's also the author of the subject of today's episode of a book called The Land Trap, a history of the world's oldest asset. Mike, welcome to Bankless.
Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Alright. Cool. So to write your book, I think you had to study land. I enjoyed this book in in kind of the history of land, and you also had to study real estate both in America and across the world, across many different countries. So I I figured you'd be the perfect person to ask this question. Why in the world has it become so much harder for people starting out to afford a home?
It's a great question. And I always think that if you were to go back, like, a hundred and fifty years or any amount of time really, I think this is one of the questions that people would struggle to understand why it hasn't been fixed, basically. Why there has been so little progress, especially if you go back, you know, fifty, sixty years, it seems a lot more difficult now than it was then. So I get 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 twentieth century. So let's talk about it from the perspective of, lik
So there's a bit of a demand issue, and then I guess you're also pointing at a supply issue as well. And I think you call them in your book these these super cities. These are the locations that everybody really wants to live in. So if The US in particular maybe is well, many countries are, but if we are in a housing crisis of sorts now, what do you think the downstream effects of this actually are? Are you convinced by the ideas in, you know, papers like the housing theory of everything, which is just like a lot of bad things are downstream of expensive land and housing costs. So you get, lik
I I do buy that argument. I should say that Sam and Ben and John, the authors of the housing theory of everything, are good friends of mine. I think there's a a lot to that argument. I also think that you can see some trends developing in The US now. Although I will say, I think there's a lot of places in the world, and we can talk about that if you like, that are that are worse affected by these sort of dynamics than than The US. But you can see in the most land constrained areas in The US, I mean, we've got the the New York election. There's an obvious dynamic in the city of haves and have n
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On the financial side, I think we saw some of those financial effects and where it could go wrong in The US, of course, in in 2008. It is fascinating how financialized land and property on top of that land has become. And this wasn't always the case. Maybe we'll get into the hist
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