This episode tackles a provocative question: are we living under a new kind of feudalism? Not the armor-and-castles version, but the economic mechanism—where a non-producing owner class extracts wealth from those who need access to essential resources. The medieval lord took 30-50% of a serf's output through labor, harvest shares, and fees for using the lord's mill or oven. Today's rentier captures a similar share through rent, fees, and the financialization of housing—without producing anything of value. Three structural parallels emerge: enclosure of the commons (medieval land privatization vs. institutional investors buying up single-family homes), hereditary privilege (land inheritance vs. intergenerational housing wealth), and labor mobility restrictions (serfs bound to the land vs. renters trapped by high costs and zero savings). The episode explores Henry George's land value tax as a historical reform that targets the unearned increment—value created by the community, not the landowner—and discusses real-world implementations in Pittsburgh, Taiwan, and Singapore. The core insight: when the rate of return on capital exceeds economic growth, wealth concentrates in land, and the cycle repeats unless deliberately broken.
#3243: Are We Modern Serfs? Land, Rent & Feudalism
How land ownership patterns mirror medieval feudalism—and what Henry George proposed to fix it.
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New to the show? Start here#3243: Are We Modern Serfs? Land, Rent & Feudalism
Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about how modern economies treat land as a profit vehicle, creating this landed class and a renting class that's increasingly locked out of ownership. And he's asking whether this looks like feudalism under a fresh coat of paint. Are we repeating a very old wealth transfer model? And have there been historical reforms that actually broke the cycle? It's a good question. And honestly, it's one of those comparisons that gets thrown around as rhetoric a lot — "we're all digital serfs now" — but the actual structural parallels are worth examining.
They really are. And I think the starting point has to be getting precise about what we mean by feudalism — not the pop-culture version with kings and jousting, but the economic mechanism. Because that's where the comparison either holds up or falls apart.
The mechanism, not the aesthetic. So let's get specific. What was the feudal extraction model, stripped down?
At its core, feudalism was a land-based economic system where the entire structure of wealth and power flowed from who controlled the land. The lord owned it — not in the modern sense of having a deed, but in the sense of having been granted control by the crown through a chain of obligations. The serf worked it. And the serf owed the lord a bundle of obligations: typically two to three days of labor per week on the lord's personal land, plus a portion of their own harvest — grain, livestock, whatever they produced. Historians estimate the extraction rate at somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of a serf's productive output.
Thirty to fifty percent right off the top, before the serf feeds their own family. That's the number that jumps out.
It wasn't just labor and produce. There were fees for using the lord's mill, the lord's oven, the lord's press. Fines for this, tithes for that. The lord controlled the infrastructure, and every use of it came with a cut. The serf couldn't leave — they were legally bound to the land. And critically, the lord didn't produce anything. The lord's wealth came entirely from owning the asset and extracting from the people who actually worked it.
The mechanism is: own the essential resource, control access to it, extract surplus from the people who need it, and make sure they can't leave. That's the engine.
Now let's define the modern rentier model. The term "rentier" comes from the French — it means someone who derives income from property or investments rather than from labor. In classical economics, rent is the income you get from owning a resource — not from producing anything, not from adding value, just from owning. A factory owner who manages production is a capitalist. A landlord who collects checks because they own the building is a rentier.
The key distinction is productive versus non-productive. The landlord didn't build the building — or if they did, they're long past the point where their labor justifies the ongoing income. The value comes from the fact that people need somewhere to live, and the landlord controls access.
Here's where it gets structural. Land is not like other assets. You can make more iPhones. You can't make more land. It's the ultimate finite resource. So when you treat land as a financial asset class — something to be bought, held, and traded for profit — you're not allocating a productive resource. You're allocating a monopoly on location.
Thomas Piketty's framing in Capital in the Twenty-First Century is useful here. He traces how, when the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth — his famous r greater than g — wealth concentrates. And land is the original form of capital that does this. Before industrialization, land was the dominant store of wealth. Piketty's argument is that we've been drifting back toward a patrimonial society where inherited wealth, much of it in real estate, matters more than what you earn.
That's the bridge to feudalism. In both systems, you have a class of non-productive owners extracting wealth from a class of producers and occupiers who can't access ownership. The mechanism is the same. The legal framework is different, the window dressing is different, but the flow of value is structurally identical.
Let's push on that. What are the actual structural parallels? Not vibes, not metaphors — mechanisms.
I'd point to three. The first is the enclosure of the commons. In medieval England, common land was shared — villagers could graze animals, collect firewood, farm small plots. Starting in the thirteenth century, lords began enclosing that land — fencing it off, privatizing it. The Statute of Merton in 1235 gave lords the legal right to do this, as long as they left "sufficient" pasture for the free tenants. Sufficient, of course, was defined by the lords.
Once the commons were enclosed, the villagers had no choice but to work the lord's land on the lord's terms. The alternative was starvation.
The modern equivalent is the financialization of urban land. REITs — real estate investment trusts — were created in 1960, but they really took off after the 2008 financial crisis. Institutional investors like Invitation Homes and Pretium Partners started buying up single-family homes by the thousands. In 2025, institutional investors bought one in every seven single-family homes sold in the US. That's up from one in fifty in 2010.
One in seven. That's not a market anomaly — that's a structural shift in who owns the housing stock.
It functions like enclosure. These aren't developers building new housing. They're buying existing homes, often outbidding first-time buyers with cash offers, and converting them into rental properties. They're enclosing the housing commons — taking homes that could have been owner-occupied and turning them into rent-extraction vehicles.
Just like the medieval commons, once the land is enclosed, the people who need it have no choice but to pay the new owner. The "sufficient pasture" in this case is the rental market they just got forced into. The second structural parallel?
Hereditary privilege versus generational wealth. In feudalism, status and land passed through inheritance. If your father was a lord, you were a lord. If your father was a serf, you were a serf. There was essentially no mobility. Today, property wealth is the primary mechanism of intergenerational wealth transfer. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances shows that about seventy percent of US household wealth is held in real estate. The top ten percent of households own forty-five percent of all rental properties. The bottom fifty percent own less than five percent.
If your parents owned a home — especially in a market that appreciated — you're likely to get help with a down payment, or inherit the house, or inherit wealth that lets you buy. If your parents rented, you're starting from zero in a market where prices keep rising faster than wages.
A study from the Urban Institute found that parental homeownership is one of the strongest predictors of adult children's homeownership — stronger than education, stronger than income. The mechanism isn't legal heredity; it's economic heredity. But the outcome is the same: the property-owning class reproduces itself, and the non-property-owning class struggles to break in.
The third parallel — and this one I think is the most under-discussed — is labor mobility restrictions. The serf couldn't leave the land. The modern renter faces what you might call rental lock-in.
This is real, and it's brutal. When thirty percent of your income goes to rent — and in cities like San Francisco and New York, it's north of fifty percent — you can't save for a down payment. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard documented this in their 2025 report: the savings rate for renter households in high-cost metros is effectively zero or negative after housing costs. So you're trapped. You can't move to a cheaper city because moving costs money. You can't buy because you can't save. You can't get a better job because you can't afford to relocate. The rental market becomes a cage.
The serf knew they were a serf. The lord wasn't subtle about it — there was a legal document, there were obligations, there was a hierarchy. The modern renter believes they're a consumer making a free choice. "I'm choosing to rent in this neighborhood because it's convenient." And within the narrow band of options the market gives them, that's true. But the structural position — paying a significant portion of your income to a non-productive owner for access to a resource you can't opt out of needing — is identical.
That's the most insidious part of the parallel. Feudalism was explicit about hierarchy. The system announced itself. Modern rentier capitalism presents itself as a market transaction between equals. The landlord provides housing; the tenant pays for it. What's hidden is that the landlord's contribution — owning — isn't productive. The value of the housing was created by the builders, the neighborhood was built by the community, the land value was created by proximity to jobs and transit and amenities that the landlord didn't create. The landlord is capturing value that society produced.
Which brings us to Henry George. This is where you light up, Herman. Tell me about the unearned increment.
Henry George was a nineteenth-century American economist and journalist. In 1879, he published Progress and Poverty — it sold over three million copies, which made it one of the most widely read books of the era, second only to the Bible for a stretch. His core insight was deceptively simple. Land value is not created by the landowner. It's created by the community. When a city builds a transit line, or a school, or a park, the value of nearby land goes up. The landowner did nothing — they just happened to own land in the right place. George called this the "unearned increment.
The landlord's windfall from a new subway stop they didn't build, near a job center they didn't create, in a city they didn't fund.
And George's solution was the land value tax, or LVT. Tax the value of the land itself — not the buildings on it, not the improvements, just the unimproved land value. The logic is that taxing land doesn't reduce the supply of land — you can't move it offshore, you can't hide it, you can't produce less of it. It's the perfect tax base. And it captures the unearned increment for public benefit instead of private profit.
This isn't just a theoretical idea that's never been tried. Parts of Australia have had land value taxes since 1910. New Zealand had it. Taiwan implemented it. Singapore's entire public housing model is built on state ownership of land with ninety-nine-year leases — the government captures land value and reinvests it.
Pittsburgh had a split-rate property tax from 1913 to 2001 — they taxed land at a higher rate than buildings, which incentivized development and discouraged land speculation. Multiple studies found it encouraged denser development and more affordable housing compared to similar cities. Denmark has a version of it. Estonia has one. It's not fringe — it's just politically difficult because it directly challenges the interests of the landed class.
If the modern system is replicating feudal extraction — enclosure, hereditary wealth, mobility restriction — the obvious question is: have we ever successfully broken out of this pattern before? And the answer, surprisingly, is yes.
Let's start with the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England. This is the one everyone learns about in school — Wat Tyler, John Ball, "when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" But the economic mechanism is what matters. The immediate trigger was a poll tax — a flat per-person tax that fell hardest on the poor. But the underlying grievance was the whole feudal extraction system: serfdom, labor obligations, tithes, the works.
The revolt actually worked, in a specific way. It didn't abolish feudalism overnight, but it terrified the ruling class. The poll tax was abandoned. Serfdom began to decline — not because the lords had a change of heart, but because the labor shortage after the Black Death had already given peasants bargaining power, and the revolt demonstrated that they could organize collectively. Within a century, serfdom was effectively dead in England.
The mechanism here is important. It wasn't a legal reform from above. It was collective action from below that disrupted the extraction system. The lords couldn't extract if the peasants refused to cooperate, and the revolt showed they could refuse at scale. The system didn't end because it was cruel — it ended because it became unworkable.
Fast forward to the twentieth century, and we get a set of land reforms in East Asia that are probably the most successful examples of breaking up concentrated land ownership without a violent revolution. Japan in 1946, South Korea in 1949, Taiwan in 1953. These were American-backed reforms — the US occupation authorities in Japan pushed it through, and the US supported it in Korea and Taiwan as a bulwark against communism.
Taiwan's 1953 reform is the one I find most instructive. The government redistributed two hundred thousand hectares of farmland to six hundred thousand tenant farmers. But here's the elegant part: they didn't just seize the land. Landlords were compensated with shares in state-owned enterprises — the government transferred ownership of industrial assets to the former landowners. So the landed gentry became industrial capitalists.
They turned the rentiers into productive investors. That's the key. You're not destroying their wealth; you're converting it from a non-productive form into a productive one. The political resistance drops because the landlords aren't being impoverished — they're being given a stake in a different kind of economy.
The results were extraordinary. Taiwan went from one of the most unequal land distributions in Asia to one of the most equal. The broad middle class that emerged from those land reforms powered what economists call the "Asian Miracle" — the rapid industrialization and growth of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. When farmers own their land, they invest in it. They improve it. They send their kids to school. The entire economic engine shifts from extraction to production.
Compare that to what didn't work. Rent control, for example. New York City has had rent control in some form since 1943. It hasn't prevented landlord consolidation. It hasn't prevented wealth extraction. What it has done is create a two-tier market where some lucky tenants have below-market rents and everyone else pays even more to compensate. It treats the symptom — high rents — without touching the cause: concentrated ownership.
There's evidence that rent control can actually entrench landlord power. A 2019 study by economists at Stanford found that San Francisco's rent control expansion in 1994 led landlords to convert rental units to condos or demolish and rebuild — reducing the rental supply by fifteen percent and driving up rents citywide. The landlords didn't lose — they adapted. The tenants who weren't in rent-controlled units lost.
The pattern from history is clear. Reforms that work either break up concentrated ownership, tax unearned land value, or give tenants property rights and collective bargaining power. Reforms that try to regulate prices without changing ownership structures fail, because the extraction mechanism is still intact.
The UK's Leasehold Reform Act of 1967 is another instructive case. Before the act, many homeowners in England and Wales didn't actually own their homes — they owned a leasehold, which meant they had the right to occupy for a fixed term, after which the property reverted to the freeholder, the actual landowner. As the lease ran down, the property became unsellable. The leaseholder had paid a mortgage for decades and ended up with nothing.
That's the musical equivalent of beige wallpaper. You pay for a house for thirty years and then it vanishes.
The 1967 act gave leaseholders the right to buy the freehold — to actually own the land under their homes. It also gave them the right to extend leases. Later reforms introduced commonhold — a form of collective ownership where residents of a building jointly own and manage it, with no external landlord. These were direct challenges to the landlord class. They transferred property rights from rentiers to occupiers.
Leasehold reform didn't solve everything — the UK still has a leasehold problem, especially with new-build houses sold as leaseholds by developers who then sell the ground rent to investors. But the principle was established: the occupier should have a path to ownership, and collective management should be possible.
Singapore is worth mentioning here too, because it shows a different model entirely. Singapore's government owns about ninety percent of the land. Housing is provided through the Housing and Development Board on ninety-nine-year leases. When the lease expires, the land reverts to the state. The state captures the land value appreciation and reinvests it in public goods. Homeownership rates in Singapore are around ninety percent — one of the highest in the world — but it's a different kind of ownership. You own the unit, not the land.
Compare that to Hong Kong. Hong Kong also has government land ownership, but it uses a land auction system — the government sells long-term leases to the highest bidder. The result is that a tiny group of developers controls the housing market, land values are astronomical, and the government captures some revenue but the developers capture the rest. Same legal starting point, radically different outcome, because the mechanism of value capture is different.
The Hong Kong system enriches a tiny elite. The Singapore system funds public goods. The difference is in who captures the unearned increment.
Let's pull this together. We've got historical reforms that worked — the end of serfdom through collective action, East Asian land redistribution, the UK's leasehold reform, Singapore's public land ownership, land value taxes in multiple countries. And we've got reforms that didn't work — rent control without ownership reform, and systems like Hong Kong that capture land value for private interests. The question is what any of this means for someone listening right now, in 2026.
I think the first thing to say is that the modern rentier system is not inevitable. It's a policy choice. The legal frameworks that enable corporate land ownership — REIT structures, tax advantages for real estate investment, zoning laws that enable land banking — these were created by legislation, and they can be reformed by legislation. We're not dealing with a force of nature. We're dealing with rules that someone wrote.
The second thing is that there are specific reform levers with historical precedent. Land value taxation is the most direct — it's been implemented, it works, the economic literature supports it, and it directly targets unearned land value without reducing the housing supply. There are active land value tax movements in dozens of countries, and some US municipalities are experimenting with split-rate property taxes again.
Another lever is collective ownership models. Community land trusts — where a nonprofit owns the land and leases it to homeowners on long-term, affordable leases — have been growing in the US and UK. The Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont is the largest in the US, with over six hundred homes. The model keeps housing permanently affordable because the land value appreciation is captured by the trust, not by individual sellers. It's a modern version of the commons.
Co-housing and housing cooperatives are another. In Zurich, about twenty-five percent of the housing stock is non-profit cooperative housing. The city actively supports it through land policy and financing. Those units are insulated from speculative markets because they can't be bought and sold for profit.
The third lever is tenant rights that go beyond rent control. Right of first refusal — when a landlord sells a building, the tenants get the first chance to buy it collectively. This exists in Washington DC and San Francisco. In Germany, tenants in some cities have a legal right to buy their building if it's being converted to condos. These policies don't just protect tenants from displacement — they create a pathway from renting to collective ownership.
The individual action point here isn't "go buy a house" — for a lot of listeners, that's not realistic given the structural barriers we've been discussing. It's more like: find out who owns your neighborhood. Look up the property records. If institutional investors are buying up your area, that's a political problem, not a personal failure. Support local community land trusts. Advocate for land value tax pilots in your municipality. If you're a renter and your building goes up for sale, know whether you have right of first refusal.
There's an uncomfortable truth underneath all of this, and I think we should name it. Modern democracy may be structurally incompatible with concentrated land ownership. Feudalism ended when political power shifted from being land-based to being capital-based — when the Industrial Revolution created a new class of wealthy industrialists who could challenge the old landed aristocracy. The political system adapted because economic power had shifted.
The question now is whether the next shift needs to happen — from capital-based power to something else. Because if AI and automation concentrate wealth even further, and if land remains the primary store of that wealth, the twenty-first century's defining political struggle may be over who captures land value. The rentier class may end up being the last class standing — the one that owns the finite resource nobody can make more of.
The feudal system didn't end because it was cruel. It ended because it was inefficient. A system where serfs had no incentive to improve the land, where lords extracted without investing, where mobility was restricted — it couldn't compete with emerging market economies. The modern rentier system may meet the same fate. When a growing share of national income goes to landlords rather than to productive investment, the engine stalls. You can't build a dynamic economy on rent extraction.
Inefficiency takes a long time to kill a system, and a lot of people suffer in the meantime. So I think the open question is this: if land is the ultimate finite resource, can any system avoid creating a landlord class? Or is the question not whether there's a landlord, but who the landlord is — private individuals extracting for profit, or the public capturing value for public benefit?
That's the question. And I don't think history gives us a definitive answer, but it does give us examples. The East Asian land reforms showed that you can break up concentrated ownership and create a broad property-owning middle class. Singapore showed that you can have public land ownership with high homeownership rates. The land value tax experiments showed that you can capture unearned increment without disrupting housing markets. None of these are perfect, but they demonstrate that alternatives exist.
The medieval serf couldn't imagine a world without lords. The idea that you could just own your own land, owe nothing to anyone, and pass it to your children — that would have seemed like fantasy. But that world arrived, eventually, through a combination of plague-driven labor shortages, peasant revolts, and the rise of a market economy that made feudal extraction obsolete. The question is whether we're due for a similar transition now — and whether we'll manage it without waiting for a catastrophe to force it.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The earliest known hurling-like stick-and-ball games in the Caspian basin were played with curved wooden sticks carved from Caspian poplar, which produced a distinct resonant crack upon striking that could be heard up to four hundred meters across the steppe — a sound described in Scythian oral tradition as "the thunder that stays on the ground.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The earliest known hurling-like stick-and-ball games in the Caspian basin were played with curved wooden sticks carved from Caspian poplar, which produced a distinct resonant crack upon striking that could be heard up to four hundred meters across the steppe — a sound described in Scythian oral tradition as "the thunder that stays on the ground.
The thunder that stays on the ground. I'm going to use that for something.
Not sure what, but it's yours now.
So where does this leave us? I think the most productive way to sit with this is to recognize that the comparison between modern rentier capitalism and feudalism isn't hyperbolic — it's mechanically accurate in ways that should trouble anyone who cares about economic mobility. But it's also not a destiny. The reforms that worked in the past worked because someone built a coalition, changed the law, and redirected the flow of value. That's still possible. The question is whether we have the political will to do it before the rentier class becomes so entrenched that reform is impossible.
So where does this leave us? I think the most productive way to sit with this is to recognize that the comparison between modern rentier capitalism and feudalism isn't hyperbolic — it's mechanically accurate in ways that should trouble anyone who cares about economic mobility. But it's also not a destiny. The reforms that worked in the past worked because someone built a coalition, changed the law, and redirected the flow of value. That's still possible. The question is whether we have the political will to do it before the rentier class becomes so entrenched that reform is impossible.
Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the wheels on. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.