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It's an established name from economics. The wikipedia definition is: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth". You ca
by chubot 11y ago
It's an established name from economics. The wikipedia definition is: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth". You can think of it as a generalization of seeking rent for a property.
For better or worse, that is what you are doing when you lease a property. You want to be paid just for owning something, not for doing anything.
Analogously, if you provide service X, you can seek "rent" in addition to the value you provide.
One way to do this is by manipulating the market for X by reducing the supply of those who provide X, e.g. through an unnecessarily onerous licensing process. The additional amount you make with the licensing process in place falls under the category of economic "rent".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- mcguire 11y agoWhile you're at it, look up 'usury'.
- gaur 11y ago> The wikipedia definition is: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth". I think I figured it out. "Rent seeking" means "trying to get something for nothing" economically. This would be a lot less confusing if people would just use straightforward terminology ("getting something for nothing") rather than an opaque phrase that sounds like something else ("rent seeking").
- Kalium 11y agoIt's a term of art. It has a very precisely defined technical meaning that specialists are familiar with and share a common understanding of. Its primary purpose is to permit those educated in the subject to converse clearly and unambiguously with one another in an efficient manner. It is perhaps not the most reasonable thing to expect specialists conversing with their peers in the argot of their field to reduce all their conversations to the point of intelligibility to the average layman. It's also perhaps not the most reasonable thing to expect all terms of art to be re-named every few decades as language shifts. Never mind the challenges of achieving consensus every time someone wants to rename something.