ACXLW Saturday Meeting #112 — The Land Trap & Why Our Brains Crave Ideology

📅 Date: Saturday, January 24, 2026
🕒 Time: 2:00 PM
📍 Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
👤 Host: Michael Michalchik — michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045

ACXLW Saturday Meeting #112 — The Land Trap & Why Our Brains Crave Ideology

Conversation Starters

1) The Land Trap (text + video)

Read: Book Review by Lars Doucet → https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike (Progress and Poverty)
Watch: Related video short → https://youtu.be/L7vGUOgSulM

Summary (medium length)

The review distills Mike Bird’s thesis: because land is scarce, immobile, and ideal collateral, modern credit cycles and investment booms revolve around land values—which can crowd out productive investment and amplify inequality. (Progress and Poverty)
Historic and global cases (e.g., Japan’s bubble/bust; China’s real-estate-centric policy trilemma) show how states and banks become structurally tied to property prices, making downturns politically and financially perilous. (Mercatus Center)
Reviewers frame Bird’s book as a Georgist-adjacent wake-up call: if land sits at the core of balance sheets (from households to franchises), reforms that change how we tax, zone, and collateralize land may be prerequisite to healthier growth. (Progress and Poverty)

Questions (provocative & concrete)

If land is the collateral core of finance, which reforms would actually shift capital back to productivity—LVT variants, zoning by-right, or haircuts on land collateral—and which might backfire? (Progress and Poverty)
In systems like China’s, any fix creates a distributional shock (to households, banks, or the wider economy). Where should that shock be absorbed, and by what mechanisms, to minimize long-run damage? (Mercatus Center)
As climate risk and engineering (e.g., safe up-zoning) effectively create/erase usable land, how should a “Georgism for the Anthropocene” update tax and planning to reflect shifting endowments? (Financial Times)

2) Why Our Brains Crave Ideology (article + short + AI summary)

Read: Nautilus → https://nautil.us/why-our-brains-crave-ideology-1203194/ (Nautilus)
Watch (short): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6HYcn5vKv...