Tuesday, December 31, 2002 :::
Not only is that a George Will column, but he refers to "rent-seeking". What fun!
A lot of things are either information discovery or rent-seeking or healthy amounts of both, and I'm trying to figure out how I'd go about measuring how much of each. Advertising — political (lobbying and campaign), commercial, non-profit — is the example I think about (fecklessly) the most, but even normal pricing activities (commodity markets, putting price tags on goods in a store, etc.) have something of this to them; indeed, many people speak of the stock market and futures markets and the like as though they were primarily rent-seeking (and among short-term speculators they may be), though they're almost certainly mostly productive.
::: posted by dWj at 12:53 PM
