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How the world's oldest asset secretly shapes our modern economy
In The Land Trap, Mike Bird The Economist s Wall Street editor pulls back the curtain on how this ancient asset exerts outsized influence over the modern world. With masterful insight into global finance, Bird reveals how land has quietly become the linchpin of the world s banking system, affecting everything from soaring housing prices to geopolitical tensions. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China s modern-day real estate crisis, Bird shows how fortunes are built or destroyed all on the bedrock of land.
As governments wrestle with inequality, climate crises threaten entire regions, and land becomes ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a bold new framework for understanding the driving force behind today s most pressing challenges. Eye-opening and timely, Bird s analysis unveils how land remains the ultimate currency of power and the key to economic survival in an increasingly fragile world.
This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the hidden game being played on a foundation as old as civilization itself. Timely, provocative, and essential, The Land Trap will change how you see the ground beneath your feet.
(Review)
Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2025 Longlist
A thought-provoking look at the little-examined role of land in making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Kirkus
The Land Trap is a phenomenal tale of the original asset to beat all others. From America's wild frontier to the skyscrapers of today's Singapore and the ghost cities produced by China's wild real-estate boom, Mike Bird takes the reader on a wonderful exploration of how land remains at the heart of the global economy even today.
Robin Wigglesworth, author of Trillions
"We know that land can neither be created nor destroyed, but what The Land Trap shows is that it also can no longer be ignored. Mike Bird walks his reader through what makes humanity's most ancient asset so special and how it has shaped modern history. A sweeping political, intellectual, and economic history that illuminates today s thorniest challenges from the housing crisis to geopolitical power. An indispens
(Author portrait)
Mike Bird is the Asia Business and Finance Editor for The Economist, where he covers financial markets, economic development, and major corporations across the continent. He also co-hosts the financial podcast Money Talks. Previously, he was a financial columnist and market reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Mike studied history and politics at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is currently based in Singapore.
(Review)
br> Smart and stimulating. The Land Trap is a brisk globe-trot through great moments in land policy, including the roots of the American Revolution, the preachings of the land-value tax evangelist Henry George, and the postcolonial land-reform movement of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Slate
"Bird s shrewd analysis crackles with fresh insights that tie together material economics with financial abstractions. The result is a stimulating take on modern finance that shows investors fates are rooted in the dirt beneath their feet."
Publishers Weekly
"One of those books that changes the way you see the world. Gripping, urgent, important."
Ed Conway, author of Material World
"This wonderful book is as welcome as it is overdue... shines a much-needed light on this essential topic."
Rory Sutherland, author of Alchemy
"A deftly written tale."
Lewis Baston, author of Borderlines
