Modern inequality is being driven by land becoming scarce again, just like in the 1800s, not by robots.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
From Malthus to Solow and Back: Land Scarcity and the Return of Ricardo
SSRN · 6360118
The Takeaway
In a major challenge to standard growth theory, this paper shows that we have exited the 'Solow' era of infinite growth and entered a 'neo-Malthusian' regime where land is the primary bottleneck. Because land and capital are now 'complements,' every technological advancement we make is currently being swallowed by rising land values, naturally forcing wages down and wealth inequality up regardless of policy.
From the abstract
Three macroeconomic regularities of the post-1980 period a declining labour share, a rising wealth-to-income ratio concentrated in land-related assets, and a slowdown in aggregate productivity growth have attracted largely separate literatures. This paper establishes all three as formal propositions within a single framework: a nested CES growth model in which land and the capital-labour aggregate are gross complements (σ < 1). When the effective growth rate of land per capita falls below labour