Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

rent-seeking: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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rent-seeking1 CONSTRUCTRent-seekingTULLOCK · WEALTH CAPTURE

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Economics

Spending resources to capture existing wealth rather than create new wealth

Gordon Tullock's 1967 paper The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies, and theft first identified the phenomenon, showing that the real cost of monopolies, tariffs, and theft is not only the transfer of wealth but also the resources people spend competing to obtain or defend such transfers. Anne Krueger gave the behaviour its name in 1974, coining rent-seeking for the pursuit of economic rent, meaning income earned by controlling a scarce privilege rather than by producing something, often through lobbying, litigation, or seeking a licence, quota, or subsidy from government. Robert Tollison's 1982 survey consolidated the idea within public choice economics, the branch that studies political decisions using the tools of economics. The construct is distinctive because it locates a social cost in effort that would count as productive in a private market: the time, money, and talent poured into capturing an existing pie are, from society's point of view, used up without adding to it. It picks out the waste of competition over a transfer, held separate from the value of the transfer itself.[1][2][3]

Unit
A category of economically unproductive activity, the resources expended to capture or defend a transfer of existing wealth
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Estimated as the resources dissipated in seeking a rent, for example lobbying outlays, legal spending, or the labour devoted to obtaining a licence or monopoly, often bounded by the value of the rent at stake

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Nearby constructs

deadweight loss1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone constructcollective action4 names · 5 citationsjangle · the free-rider problem, four verdictsdissipation4 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, four constructs

References

  1. Tullock, G. (1967). The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies, and theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224–232. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1967.tb01923.x
  2. Krueger, A. O. (1974). The political economy of the rent-seeking society. The American Economic Review, 64(3), 291–303.
  3. Tollison, R. D. (1982). Rent seeking: A survey. Kyklos, 35(4), 575–602. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1982.tb00174.x

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