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An Excerpt from The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset

by Mike Bird

An excerpt from The Land Trap by Mike Bird, published by Portfolio and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.

In The Land Trap, Mike Bird—Wall Street editor at The Economist—reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate crisis today, Bird shows how fortunes are built—and destroyed—on the bedrock of land.

Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly became the linchpin of the global banking system, driving everything from soaring housing prices to rising geopolitical tensisons. As governments wrestle with inequality and land grows ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a powerful new framework for understanding the hidden force behind today's most urgent challenges. 

This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the real 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.

The Land Trap has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's opening chapter, "The Lie of the Land."

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About 3,200 years ago, more than a millennium before Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, more than six centuries before the birth of either Plato or Confucius, a lucky servant named Munnabittu received a gift of land from Meli-Šipak II, one of the Kassite kings who reigned in ancient Babylon.  

We know quite a few things about Munnabittu and his patch of earth. We know that he owned several hundred acres, a little more than a square mile. The parcel would have made him moderately rich, but not immensely so. We know that the land was on the banks of a canal in a place called Hudadu, possibly an ancient name for Baghdad. We know the name of some of Munnabittu’s neighbors too, because he faced a legal challenge over the ownership of his plot, and we know that the decision eventually fell in Munnabittu’s favor. We know the names of the officials who adjudicated the disagreement, and we know the names of the bureaucrats who trekked from the royal palace of Marduk-apla-iddina I, the son of Meli-Šipak II, to confirm the size of the estate. 

We know more with some degree of certainty about Munnabittu—a Babylonian servant who lived in the dying days of the Bronze Age, who was otherwise a historical nobody—than we do about many of the kings, warriors, scholars and prophets who were born during the centuries and millennia that followed. We know about Munnabittu specifically and solely because of the land he possessed, the ownership and saga of which is carved into a piece of smooth black limestone around half a meter long. The stone was recovered from Susa, in Iran, by archaeologists in the early twentieth century. Known as a kudurru, the stone was the centrally held record of the servant’s landownership. Munnabittu likely would have had a replica of his own to prove possession to any subsequent doubters. 

The fact that Munnabittu’s story was recorded in such a permanent manner, and survived for thousands of years even as so much other knowledge was lost, is not some fluke of history. Munnabittu’s wealth was carved indelibly into solid stone for a good reason. For many early civilizations, land was power. Governments collected taxes in the form of grain, for which records of ownership were of the utmost importance. Without knowing who owned each segment of earth, it was impossible to know who owed what to the tax collectors. For the very earliest agricultural economies, the way in which land was owned, organized and used was one of the foremost priorities of state-building, which made the difference between economic survival and total collapse. 

Across a range of ancient languages, among different civilizations spread thousands of miles around the world, some of the very earliest surviving records are those that delineate landownership. In India, flat copper plates recorded grants of land from local rulers, often to religious establishments, from as early as the third and fourth centuries BC. In Egypt, tombs that were built and sealed more than four thousand years ago are inscribed with the details of the lives of the men buried within—including descriptions of the land they owned. Before the existence of investment funds, pensions, stocks, bonds or international currency markets, even before human history was recorded in any meaningful way, land was the original asset. The ability to own and control territory was the first means of turning power into wealth.

Munnabittu would presumably find a lot of things about the modern world very confusing, but there are elements that might seem familiar to him. After centuries of gargantuan social and economic change, land is still at the center of our world. Owning it still confers social status and financial security. It is still the asset that governs the course of our lives, our successes and failures, more than any other form of wealth. Today, land remains the world’s largest single asset by some margin and a prized possession to its owners. One estimate, by the McKinsey Global Institute, pins the total value of land at about 35 percent of the $520 trillion in real wealth on earth, a category that includes all of the physical and intangible assets in the world, from buildings to intellectual property.1 The total sum of the machinery, infrastructure and equipment across the planet makes up another 17 percent, while commercial property and residential housing—the actual structures on top of the land—are worth another 11 percent and 21 percent apiece. 

That makes the market in land about twice as valuable as all of the listed companies on every stock exchange in the world. While those publicly traded securities are monitored, second by second, by a global army of investors and a breathless financial media, land is relegated to a second-order asset, hidden within the categories of housing and real estate. When we talk about commercial and residential property, the terms we use tend to give the impression that it is the buildings rather than the earth below them that hold most of the real value. But in the bustling cities where housing and property are most expensive, that is overwhelmingly because of the high price of land. Most of the variations in the price of properties, street by street, town by town and indeed country by country, are variations in the cost of land, not the structures on top. In places where real estate is most expensive, land makes up a far larger share of the total value of properties. 

In an increasingly intangible and digital world, the centrality of land poses a puzzle. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the share of land in private assets in the countries across the rich world (those for which data is available) has risen from 18 to 26 percent on average.2 Relative to all the other forms of wealth taken together—both financial assets like stocks and bonds, and real wealth like buildings, machinery and intellectual propert—the importance of land has only increased, even as the world seems to have become more incorporeal. In the booming economies of East Asia, the source of so much of the world’s economic growth over the last three decades, the value of land has exploded. In China alone, a tremendous real estate boom has created tens of trillions of dollars of land wealth. No asset is more powerful in global finance than land, which serves as a form of vital security to lenders in rich and poor countries alike, enabling tremendous volumes of borrowing for households, small companies and entire governments. 

The immense power of land is also what can make it enormously dangerous. Many of the biggest economic and social challenges that we believe are disparate and unrelated problems—financial booms and busts, sluggish economic growth, the persistence of inequality and the bitter zero-sum politics of today and throughout history—are rooted in land and the unique ways it functions as an asset. The explanation of why the world is still so hooked on our most ancient form of wealth, how we reached this state of affairs and the dangers it poses to us all are the focus of this book. The nature of land, who owns it and its vital position in the financial system matter enormously for every one of us, even when we don’t know it. It is not just the most important asset to the billions of ordinary people for whom it is their greatest store of wealth, but one that can make and break families, businesses and even entire nations.


Excerpted from The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset by Mike Bird, published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Mike Bird. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Mike Bird is the Wall Street editor for The Economist, leading coverage of topics across the American financial industry and contributing to coverage of finance globally. He also cohosts the financial podcast Money Talks. Previously, he was a financial columnist and market reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Bird studied history and politics at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is currently based in New York City.

 

Endnotes
1. Jonathan Woetzel et al., The Rise and Rise of the Global Balance Sheet (McKinsey 
Global Institute, 2021).
2. Author’s calculations, World Inequality Database.
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How the world's oldest asset secretly shapes our modern economy In The Land Trap, Mike Bird--Wall Street editor at The Economist--reveals how this ...
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