What Landlord Power Does to Human Empathy

When a landlord displaces a family with a six-month-old rather than fix a leak, is that just a bad person — or is the system designed to produce that outcome? This episode examines Israeli rental law's structural power imbalances, the psychology of petty sovereignty, and whether the landlord-tenant relationship itself selects for dehumanization. Drawing on data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, comparative law from Germany and France, and decades of power psychology research from Zimbardo and Milgram, we ask a hard question: does being a landlord make people worse, or do worse people become landlords?