3 ms·

Look at all the rent Apple is seeking on the new 12 inch Macbook, for example. In 2015 the world supply of 12 inch Macbooks increased suddenly and unexpectedly

Look at all the rent Apple is seeking on the new 12 inch Macbook, for example. In 2015 the world supply of 12 inch Macbooks increased suddenly and unexpectedly. Nobody saw it coming. The world simply has a great new product in it starting in 2015 that it didn't have in 2014 or 2013. On HN there were 1269 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172373 One thousand, two hundred, sixty-nine! The current front-page has 6-12 comments on most stories, and tops out at 59 for a popular OpenSSL security advisory people care about and are discussing, to up to 141 for a large piece of news about Tesla direct sales being allowed in NJ. (A big issue because people feel strongly about this.) 1269 comments on the 12 inch macbook. Clearly people feel strongly about the sudden discovery of 12 inch Macbook deposits worldwide! It's a totally new thing, amazing. The top comment at that link states that this is a beautiful machine. Another comment says "The overall design of the new MacBook is revolutionary." This is a spontaneous revolution that happened worldwide in 2015. Now let's turn to rents. As another poster said in the present thread[1], "A graph of world economic growth since the invention of fire shows anything but diminishing returns however. If rent-seeking behaviour is increasing, it's because the pie is - at least on a global level - growing at an accelerating rate." The amount of value this machine has for users is way more than the incremental increase in what was available between 1982 and 1983, for example, at the same number of inflation-adjusted dollars. But that other poster continues in the same comment (still [1], in this thread): "Elites always have and always will seek to take disproportionate shares of that wealth because they can." Apple is an elite market-maker. Although there is a spontaneous increase in 2015 in the availability of the highly desirable 12-inch Macbook, in fact Apple is not giving them away at cost. Or even within 5% of cost. It has positioned itself as a rentier sitting on its laurels and enjoying the profits of the worldwide spontaneous existence of a large deposit of totally new 12 inch Macbooks. It is taking a disproportionate share of the wealth, the actual, true, value that has just spontaneously sprung into existence this year without any work from Apple. Out of nowhere, you have a trackpad that responds to a force-push. Out of nowhere, you have a machine that weighs just a hair over 2 pounds, a full pound lighter than the previous 13-inch macbook air and 16% lighter than the previous, impossibly small 11-inch Macbook air. But with a full-size 12 inch retina display, and lasting 9 hours on a charge. People want it. I want it. But Apple is hoarding this spontaneous innovation and creation. Truly, no clearer example could possibly be found of "Elites have and will always take disproportionate share of wealth", than Apple, which has secured a one hundred percent monopoly on a spontaneous natural resource that everyone could enjoy. This is rent in action. It has led to a smart phone in every single person's pocket when they did it with the iPhone in 2007. It has led to a proliferation of tablet PC's that changed the face of mobile computing the world over, when they did it with the iPad. And it makes my blood boil to see them do it with the 12 inch Macbook. It's just bald-faced theft of a disproportionate share of the world's wealth. They're even blatant about it, with this graph: http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c01b8d0e769c0970c-800wi http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c01b8d0e769... How can they get away with this? This is an absolute blatant boast that they are taking a disproportionate share of the wealth that is spontaneously created, and that they have absolutely nothing to do with. They do so at prices that show obvious and blatant rent. Are we just going to idly sit by and let them do it? Even cheer them on? (for the satire-impaired: yes) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233624

bcg1 12y ago
What you're describing is just smart business. Producing a desirable product that people choose to buy is not rent-seeking, it is the free market fulfilling a need/want at price people are willing to pay. An example of rent-seeking however would be if Apple set up deals with schools and colleges to roll the cost of devices into their tuition, which is really mostly malinvestment paid with student loan debt. If the amount of student loans were to reach $1 trillion for example, the government might start talking about forgiving those loans or making them eligible for bankruptcy... if that happens, Apple doesn't have their profits clawed back, even though they actively contributed to the problem. That would be rent-seeking.
- logicallee 12y ago
  you didn't read the author's definition of rent, which was more technical than "rent-seeking". For example, if you self-publish an ebook for $49, nearly 100% of that would be considered rent by the author. Read his definition carefully.
  - bcg1 12y ago
    My apologies, I got lost inside my own brain, as I often do. After re-reading I realize that I did not detect the tone of your commentary, so I respectfully withdraw any criticism of it. I still stand by my own statement however :)
- collyw 12y ago
  Their app store could easily be viewed as rent seeking.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
"Some innovators are not rent-seekers" does not imply "No innovator is a rent-seeker" or even "Most innovators are not rent-seekers". This is an argument about distributions, and you've provided a (very funny) datapoint that tells us almost nothing about the distributions, and which most of us were already aware of. The interesting question is: how much innovation and investment is going into rent-seeking vs building new products people actually want? There has been an argument from at least the 90's that rent-seeking was impeding innovation in technology. When Microsoft was the dominant force in tech the joke was that you couldn't start a company that would be the next Microsoft, but you could start a company that would get bought and just down by Microsoft to preempt any competitive threat, and that was just as good a way to get rich as building the next Microsoft. History didn't work out quite the way the advocates of that argument predicted, and it is unlikely to do so this time.

bcg1 12y ago

What you're describing is just smart business. Producing a desirable product that people choose to buy is not rent-seeking, it is the free market fulfilling a need/want at price people are willing to pay. An example of rent-seeking however would be if Apple set up deals with schools and colleges to roll the cost of devices into their tuition, which is really mostly malinvestment paid with student loan debt. If the amount of student loans were to reach $1 trillion for example, the government might start talking about forgiving those loans or making them eligible for bankruptcy... if that happens, Apple doesn't have their profits clawed back, even though they actively contributed to the problem. That would be rent-seeking.

logicallee 12y ago
you didn't read the author's definition of rent, which was more technical than "rent-seeking". For example, if you self-publish an ebook for $49, nearly 100% of that would be considered rent by the author. Read his definition carefully.
- bcg1 12y ago
  My apologies, I got lost inside my own brain, as I often do. After re-reading I realize that I did not detect the tone of your commentary, so I respectfully withdraw any criticism of it. I still stand by my own statement however :)
collyw 12y ago
Their app store could easily be viewed as rent seeking.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

"Some innovators are not rent-seekers" does not imply "No innovator is a rent-seeker" or even "Most innovators are not rent-seekers". This is an argument about distributions, and you've provided a (very funny) datapoint that tells us almost nothing about the distributions, and which most of us were already aware of. The interesting question is: how much innovation and investment is going into rent-seeking vs building new products people actually want? There has been an argument from at least the 90's that rent-seeking was impeding innovation in technology. When Microsoft was the dominant force in tech the joke was that you couldn't start a company that would be the next Microsoft, but you could start a company that would get bought and just down by Microsoft to preempt any competitive threat, and that was just as good a way to get rich as building the next Microsoft. History didn't work out quite the way the advocates of that argument predicted, and it is unlikely to do so this time.