We don’t talk much about land reform these days, but after reading Simon Winchester’s “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” I am wondering whether we should. In the United States, Winchester points out, “the top 100” landowners, taken together, own “as much land as the entire state of Florida.” Nor is this exclusively the result of the dead hand of the past. As Winchester explains, “Since 2007 the amount of American land owned by these wealthy 100 has increased by 50 percent, and is showing no signs of slowing down.”
