The Appreciation Constituency: Land, Credit, and the Politics of Protected Assets (opens in new tab)

The passive extraction of land value was the central problem of industrial capitalism. Bird sees that the mechanism is universal and persistent across political systems and centuries. The argument waiting inside The Land Trap, and the one its evidence most powerfully supports, is that democratic capitalism has a structural tendency to convert the aspiration for broad prosperity into an engine of asset price inflation that it cannot, by its own logic, correct... Continue reading The Appreciati...