Some of the earliest surviving written words describe a land dispute in ancient Sumeria, a testament to the importance of land and who owns it in human history. Economist reporter Mike Bird argues in his book The Land Trap that the the scarcity, immobility, and permanence of land has made it a unique and integral part of political economy since those earliest clay tablets were created. The titular land trap he identifies is that the economic and financial power of land can unlock tremendous prosperity but also create intractable social and political problems for those governing it if not managed properly.

Singapore receives strong marks from him based on the government’s ability to use the world’s oldest asset to create stable prosperity and avoid the speculative bubbles that plagued Japan in the latter half of the 20th century and have emerged in China more recently. They accomplished this by separating ownership from tenure through a law that allowed the government to buy out prior owners at below market rates on the argument that rewarding land owners for publicly financed developments that raised its value does not build sustainable prosperity. Instead, the government embarked on a social housing project that enables long term tenancy without the accumulation of large land holdings as have cropped up in Hong Kong and China or the land price bubble that has dragged down Japan’s economic growth since it popped.

His description of the “confiscatory” but ultimately productive seizure of land in Singapore stands in stark contrast to his lack of interest in how the American revolutionaries went about displacing North America’s indigenous inhabitants. By his telling, colonists could see the opportunities presented by the land itself and fought the British to exploit it albeit in “sometimes violent” ways against native peoples. Then we flash forward a century where the likes of Henry George put forward land taxation as the “frontier” was closing with literally no discussion of the process by which the transfer of ownership took place.

His error is a typical in histories of America’s shift from colonial rebellion to settler expansion: the concern for white settler interests at the expense of others and the rather lofty terms used to describe what was in reality a violent process of genocidal dispossession:

Land speculation was much more than a moneymaking scheme. The egalitarian and prosperous world the colonists had pioneered, and by extension the American concepts of freedom that had emerged, only really worked if the residents had high levels of land ownership.

He can hardly be singled out for this selective history, but it is glaring nonetheless given that Native scholars like Vine Deloria have long ago published ample evidence of the violence and duplicity that shaped this “American concept of freedom”. Writers like J Sakai or CLR James could hardly quibble with Bird’s assertion about land’s importance to the story of America’s founding or its present day wealth. They or anyone who’s read them would just have the good sense to recognize it was “egalitarian” in only a very limited (i.e. racist) sense.

There are many questions I thought about while reading mainly because I realized eventually he had no intent on considering them. What is the value of land that might be restored to the control of native people based on treaties abrogated by the US? What role might land play in calculating reparations owed to Black people for the brutality of chattel slavery? How much present day wealth of white Americans today can be traced back to this disposession? What role might reforming land ownership play in forging a more just future? Unfortunately, the only discussion of the present day implications is a lament over the cost of building housing in northern California. Talk about a closed frontier!

For a book all about land, there’s little coverage of how European empires or their American descendants expanded across the world. In his telling, the wealth accumulated by European colonies throughout the middle of the second millenium was not extracted but produced through some regime of land tenure that goes almost entirely unexamined until the colonial powers leave. The only exception is his positive view of the land policy that Singapore inherited from their British forefathers. One is left to wonder what happened in all those other lands upon which the sun never set.

Instead of a new history of land around the world, Bird stretches a detailed examination of land policies in Asia into a far grander theory of land through the ages without delving deep enough into other areas to render it convincing.

The land trap : a new history of the world’s oldest asset / Mike Bird. -Penguin (2025)

Veteran economics reporter David Lynch does an admirable job assembling the perspectives of key policymakers working to achieve the global economy we have today as well as its discontents. Despite that, I came away from this book feeling as I do about many mainstream economics books: there’s useful information here but key blind spots as well.

Perhaps the most telling example is his analysis of how the China came to be admitted to the global marketplace in the early 2000s. According to US politicians and policy makers, adding China to the WTO would not only produce economic benefits but political systems more to the liking of those in the US. Lynch laments towards the end of the book that China’s rise has failed to lead to liberalization in their governance and, therefore, they remain a threat to stability. Implicit in this framing is the notion that US actions over this same period were all driven by a desire for stability, which might be a bit confusing to anyone familiar with US actions during the so-called “Global War on Terror”.

He should be commended for including the perspective of those fighting the establishmenr of organizations like the WTO at landmark protests in Seattle and elsewhere. He lets them speak for themselves for the most part, though can’t resist letting his own more conventional views shine through. For example, his response to the claim that this global trading system was a means of extracting profits at the expense of workers, he expresses skepticism because corporate shareholders and executives hadn’t gotten “more greedy” over time. This also would be a surprise to anyone examining the rise of inequality between workers and owners over the last few decades.

On the positive side, I came away with a much clearer picture of why the issue of trade became such a potent political weapon for someone like Donald Trump as well as why those in favor of these policies were caught so flat-footted by his attacks on a trade system that many voters hated but politicians in both parties had embraced with near total conviction. Trump’s approach to trade may be sclerotic and muddled, but it didn’t take a genius to see the geographic concentration of manufacturing job losses could turn disaffection into votes, especially in the context of a US presidential election.

Lynch is blunt in his assessments, clear in his writing, and admirable in his attempt to answer an interesting question: why did so many of the promises of globalization fail to materialize? Economics jargon is kept to a minumum but so is systemic analysis or critque. Still, the assemblage of firsthand accounts for a story spanning decades make this a useful read to anyone interested in the development of globalization.

The world’s worst bet : how the globalization gamble went wrong (and what would make it right) / David J. Lynch. – PublicAffairs, 2025

I’ve always been an avid reader but sometimes struggle to remember what I’ve read after I’ve moved on to the next book. In order to record my own reading and help people find books they may be interested, I’m going to start posting brief reviews. Hope you enjoy!

For years I’ve resisted the temptation to be rude to the callers on the other end of spam calls, despite their increasing ubiquity. I came away from this book feeling as though not being verbally hostile was perhaps all I could do to help them.

Weaving together recent history and interviews with those who’ve managed to escape, the authors paint a grim portrait of an industry that has festered in the shadows underneath the information superhighway. They focus mainly on southeast Asia on operations that grew out of casinos. These increasingly corporatized operations, complete with HR departments and motivational office decor, hop from place to place as they try and stay one step ahead of attempts to quash them.

Some victims are lured by the promise of an easy and lucrative job. Others by those they’ve befriended online or someone from their hometown who assure them the opportunity is legit. But for many victims, it’s not until they’re behind the walls of these secretive compounds that they realize their fate is as sealed as the windows.

Balancing an image of these workers as both victim and perpetrator is but one contradiction that confronts the reader in this academic but readable account. Another is the contemporary dilemma of having the ability to contact anyone around the world while simultaneously lacking any freedom of movement due to draconian surveillance and constant threat of violence. Even if they escape the compound, they are often confronted by a local population and government whose livelihood depends on supporting the scam operations as cleaners, cooks, or protection from authorities.

Though the book left me wanting more detail on specifics inside these operations, it’s hard to fault the authors for that given how these groups operate. Highly recommend to anyone who has wondered what’s happening on the other end of these calls.

Scam : inside Southeast Asia’s cybercrime compounds / Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, and Mark Bo. – Verso, 2025