Tag Archives: economic rent

… as the authors of the new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development have explained, there is a growing concern that increasing market concentration in leading sectors of the global economy and the growing market and lobbying powers of dominant corporations are creating a new form of global rentier capitalism to the detriment of balanced and inclusive growth for the many. And they’re not just talking about financial rentier incomes, which has been the focus of...

Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center and one of the editors of this blog] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market power to gain political power that in turn allows them to gain more market power, and vice versa. Zingales called this the “Medici vicious circle”: “Money is used to gain political power and political power is then used to make more money.”A new UN report shows...

Socialism a century ago seemed to be the wave of the future. There were various schools of socialism, but the common ideal was to guarantee support for basic needs, and for state ownership to free society from landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. In the West these hopes are now much further away than they seemed in 1917. Land and natural resources, basic infrastructure monopolies, health care and pensions have been increasingly privatized and financialized. Instead of Germany and...

Theresa May’s speech this morning was trailed as a defence of free market capitalism. If that’s what it was, it failed because she failed to answer the big questions.... Stumbling and MumblingDucking questions about capitalism Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Back in April, I wrote about one of the most troubling mysteries in economics, the falling labor share. Less of the income the economy produces is going to people who work, and more is going to people who own things.... Mystery to morons conventional economists maybe.Here, Noah, read this: Michal Kalecki, "Political Aspects of Full Employment" (Political Quarterly, 1943). It's even posted at Brad DeLong's site.It's a feature of capitalism, or a bug, depending on which side one is on. The...

The two authors [Jan De Loecker of Princeton University and Jan Eeckhout of University College London] find a large increase in the average markup from 1980 to 2014—specifically an increase by a factor of 3.65. In 1980, the average markup was 18 percent and by 2014, the average was 67 percent. But interestingly, the increase is concentrated at the top of the markup distribution: The firm at the 90th percentile in 2014 had a markup of about 160 percent, compared to a markup of 40 percent for...

Value determined by the price the market will bear rather than by cost.  The classical definition of economic rent is market price in excess of cost of production (ht Michael Hudson).Occasional Links & Commentary“Profits above morals and humanity”David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Bibliography.Medium — Matt StollerHow to Educate Yourself on Monopoly Power Matt Stoller ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

Imagine we lived in a feudal society in which lords exploited peasants. A defender of the system might argue that wealthy lords perform a useful service; they protect their peasants from invasion and theft thus giving them security and a little prosperity. And competition between lords should improve these services; bad lords will find their lands and peasants seized by better lords who become wealthier as a result.Such an argument would, however, miss the point. The case against feudalism...

Interview with Vlado Plaga in the German magazine FAIRCONOMY, September 2017.VP: You are advocating a revival of classical economics. What did the classical economists understand by a free economy? MH: They all defined a free economy as one that is free from land rent, free from unearned income. Many also said that a free economy had to be free from private banking. They advocated full taxation of economic rent. Today’s idea of free market economics is the diametric opposite. In an...