I find it interesting that the article (referring to the original article [1], not the economist's which is mostly just some sort of political piece) considered

I find it interesting that the article (referring to the original article [1], not the economist's which is mostly just some sort of political piece) considered unproductive rent seeking mostly in forms of corrupt relationships between government and industry. Quoting that article, "Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur: the “unproductive” ones, who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will, in the process stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Economists call this rent-seeking behavior." However, should rent seeking behavior in traditional business to consumer (or business to business) relationships be excluded? Take for instance the explosion in software being sold as a service even when such things make very little practical sense. The 'cloud' certainly has some uses, but companies are trying to shoehorn it into absolutely everything and no small part of the motivation there is to justify charging an going rent for usage of software that's not fundamentally changing. The same is, in a way, even increasingly true of entertainment. Ever larger number of games are designed around attempts to coerce players into engaging in ongoing purchases after buying the game, often to no end as in the case of buying consumable items or currency of various sorts. In the end it seems identical as the idea is to artificially increase revenue through the seeking of rent instead of the creation of new products. [1] - https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kind-of-entrepreneurship https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kin...