Must-Reads of 2017: Getting Serious About Land

Sometimes focusing on just one thing makes a lot of other things clearer. So let's look at land:

That's from "Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing," a 2017 book by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane. I mentioned it in a column in November, but I hadn't actually finished it yet. Since then I have, and it's very much worth a read. Most of it is a calm, clear, seemingly fair review of the role of land in economic theory and economic reality, and how skyrocketing land values have in recent decades come to shape and perhaps misshape the global economy. At the end, when the authors get to recommendations, you may be taken aback by some of the things they have in mind. But that's all the more reason to read the book. It's not the best thing I've read all year (that would be Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge"), but it is the book that did the most to alter my perception of the world.

Ryan-Collins, Lloyd and Macfarlane are British, and their focus is on the U.K. and in particular the south of England, where the consequences of expensive land have become starkly apparent. But even in the U.S., where in most of the country land remains pretty cheap relative to overall economic activity, high land prices in coastal cities seem to be changing the national economy in unwelcome ways -- for example, by discouraging people in poorer parts of the country from moving to where the wealth is.