Brian Potter, in his weekly Construction Physics blog, gives a mini-review of Lars Doucet’s “The Land Trap,” reprinted below.
See the full blog post here: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/reading-list-12132025
Lars Doucet reviews “The Land Trap”
Mike Bird, a journalist at the Economist, has a new book out about land, “The Land Trap”, which “reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world”. Lars Doucet, who wrote his own book about land, and who writes about land economics at his substack, Progress and Poverty, has a good review of it:
Mike Bird, writer for the Economist, has written an excellent book called The Land Trap, whose basic premise is that land is a big deal. If you’ve read my own book on that subject you’ll find many parallels in Bird’s, but his book has a second purpose. That purpose is to warn us of the titular Land Trap, which I expect will join other established terms like “Cost Disease,” “The Two-Income Trap”, and “The Resource Curse” in the economic lexicon.
The book can be summarized in five bullet points and one fun fact.
The five bullet points are:
- Land is a big deal, and always has been
- Land has only recently been financialized
- Financializing land causes “The Land Trap”
- It has short term benefits but devastating long term consequences
- China serves as a perfect example of what not to do
The fun fact is this:
- Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.