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113 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 17 Jul 2023 \ on: Five Economic Terms You Should Know When Learning About Bitcoin bitcoin
Great write up!
Rent seeking is one of the less intuitive concepts in economics, partly due to the name not applying to most modern rental arrangements. It's also mistakenly taken as an inherently bad thing for society, when it's quite context dependent.
In a more technical sense, rent is the amount you're able to charge above your marginal costs, in equilibrium. Sometimes this is bad (subsidies and barriers to entry), but sometimes it's just a feature of the world. Setting aside government favors, Iowa farmers extract huge rents because their land is extremely well suited to growing corn, but the corn price is set by marginal growers in drier states with worse soils. That allows farmers in Iowa to persistently sell at a price greater than their marginal costs.
Very true. I didn't discuss beneficial rent seeking in my article. Excellent example.
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Rent control is an example of price control. Rent control is an example of rent seeking for tenants who live in old buildings
California has a ballot initiative this year in November called the Justice for Renters Act. It seeks to give cities and towns more authority to cap rent. Landlords oppose justice!
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Correct, although landlords adjust their behavior to bring their marginal cost down to the artificially low rental rate.
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No repairs
No maintenance
It’s Calcutta on the Hudson as Daniel Patrick Moynihan would say in a different context
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