Land ownership has NOT produced racial hierarchy, gender inequity, underdevelopment and environmental degradation

See ‘Land Power’ and ‘The Land Trap’: The Human Story Has Many Plots: Struggles over who can own land and its wealth have driven wars and changed societies by Edward Glaeser. Excerpts:

"Mr. Albertus also argues that the struggle over land ownership has produced “racial hierarchy, gender inequity, underdevelopment and environmental degradation.” Maybe. The conquest of the Americas and the use of enslaved labor for farming was indeed catastrophic for Africans and Native Americans, but Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho were the first four states to give women the vote. Farming the Amazon is still producing “environmental destruction on a massive scale” but, as Mr. Bird’s chapter on Singapore reminds us, development can soar without land as long as there are strong property rights and accessible, excellent schools."

"But even if we accept Mr. Albertus’s view that “our lives today are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands” over the past two centuries, it does not follow that shifting land around is more effective an antipoverty tool than, say, investing in education or urban sanitation. Mr. Albertus’s own work, cited by Mr. Bird, finds that “land reform actually lowered levels of human capital accumulation” in Peru and that “under certain conditions it also has the potential to stunt urbanization, wealth accumulation, and ultimately education by encouraging land reform beneficiaries to remain in the countryside and employ their children on the farm rather than migrating to urban areas where opportunities for upward mobility are greater.”" 

"Missing from both books is a serious discussion about the connection between property rights and the value and use of land. The powers of a landowner can range from the almost full sovereignty enjoyed by a mighty feudal noble to the essentially nonexistent rights I have over the protected swampland outside my window. Over the past 60 years, the nature of land ownership in the U.S. has changed because land-use regulations have increasingly limited the right to build. In 1763, William Pitt the Elder trumpeted the rights of the small English landholder: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail—its roof may shake—the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter—the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter—all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” That proud sentiment, linking freedom with land, feels increasingly untrue."