CONCEPT
Rent-Seeking (Stiglitz)
The extraction of value through structural position rather than genuine productive contribution — the mechanism by which, Stiglitz argues, a substantial portion of wealth concentrated at the top of advanced economies represents returns on market power, regulatory capture, and institutional design rather than value creation.
Rent-seeking is the economist's term for capturing value through control of access rather than through production of value. In Stiglitz's career-long development of the concept, it describes how platform monopolies, patent holders, and incumbents extract income from positions that owe more to institutional design than to merit. The AI economy, despite its mythology of meritocratic disruption, is becoming one of the most prolific generators of rent in economic history. The Software Death Cross is not a transition from production to production. It is a migration from one form of rent — the premium on scarce coding capacity — to another — control of ecosystems, data layers, and switching costs — and the new rent is more concentrated than the old.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Stiglitz's framework distinguishes two sources of income above competitive-market levels: returns to genuine contribution, which reflect real scarcity of valuable capability, and rents,