Mihályi and Szelényi provide a timely contribution to contemporary debates about inequality of incomes and wealth, offering a careful examination of various sources of rent in contemporary societies, and considering several policy options to reduce inequality in order to preserve the meritocratic nature of liberal democracies. While Rent-Seekers, Profits, Wages and Inequality acknowledges the rapid and disturbing increase of incomes and wealth in the top 1 or 0.1%, it focuses on the increasing rent component of incomes and wealth in the top 20% as even more consequential. The attention to cutting-edge issues on inequality in macroeconomics, political science and sociology will appeal to social scientists interested in income distribution and wealth accumulation.

Rent Seeking and Human Capital: How the Hunt for Rents Is Changing Our Economic and Political Landscape explores the debates around rent seeking and contextualizes it within the capitalist economy. It is vital that the field of economics does a better job of analyzing and making policy recommendations that reduce the opportunities and rewards for rent seeking, generating returns from the redistribution of wealth rather than wealth creation. This short and provocative book addresses the key questions: Who are the rent seekers? What do they do? Where do they come from? What are the consequences of rent seeking for the broader economy? And, finally: What should policymakers do about them? The chapters examine the existing literature on rent seeking, including looking at the differences between rent seeking and economic rent. The work provides an in-depth look at the case of the impact of rent seeking degrees in the United States, particularly in business and law, and explores potential policy remedies, such as a wealth tax, changes to the rules on financial transactions, and patent law reform. This text provides an important intervention on rent seeking for students and scholars of heterodox economics, political economy, inequality, and anyone interested in the shape of the modern capitalist economy.

As the reader of this book probably already knows, I have devoted a great deal of time to the topic which is, rather unfortunately, named rent seeking. Rent seeking, the use of resources in actually lowering total product although benefiting some minority, is, unfortunately, a major activity of most governments. As a result of this, I have stumbled on a puzzle. The rent-seeking activity found in major societies is immense, but the industry devoted to producing it is nowhere near as immense. In Washington the rent-seeking industry is a very conspicuous part of the landscape. On the other hand, if you consider how much money is being moved by that industry, then it is comparatively small. The first question that this book seeks to answer is: How do we account for the disparity? A second problem is that almost all rent seeking is done in what superficially appears to be an extremely inefficient way. I recently got estimates of the net cost to the public of the farm program and its net benefit to the farmers. The first is many times the second. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that in the long run, today's farmers are better off than they would be if the program had never been implemented. Of course, in any given year, cancelling the program would be quite painful. The first section of this book, then, is devoted to this problem.

The fifth volume in The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock consists of six parts, each part expounding on a separate component of the field. Part 1, "Rent Seeking: An Overview," brings together two papers that focus on problems of defining rent-seeking behavior and outline the nature of the ongoing research program in a historical perspective. Part 2, "More on Efficient Rent Seeking," contains four contributions in which Tullock elaborates on his 1980 article on efficient rent seeking. Part 3, "The Environments of Rent Seeking," consists of eight papers that collectively display the breadth of the rent-seeking concept. Part 4, "The Cost of Rent Seeking," comprises seven papers that address several important issues about the cost of rent seeking to society as a whole. Part 5 is Tullock's short monograph Exchanges and Contracts, in which he develops a systematic theory of exchange in political markets. In Part 6, "Future Directions for Rent-Seeking Research," Tullock focuses on the importance of information in the political marketplace. This work has been carefully constructed to build on the inaugural volume in this collection and to ease students through the field in a clear and concise manner. Gordon Tullock is Professor Emeritus of Law at George Mason University, where he was Distinguished Research Fellow in the Center for Study of Public Choice and University Professor of Law and Economics. He also taught at the University of South Carolina, the University of Virginia, Rice University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Arizona. In 1966 he founded the journal that became Public Choice and remained its editor until 1990. Charles K. Rowley was Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University. He was also General Director of the Locke Institute.

This paper studies the relationship between wealth inequality and occupational choice between rent-seeking and production. With imperfect credit markets and a fixed cost to rent-seeking, only wealthy agents choose to engage in rent-seeking as it enables them to protect their wealth from expropriation. Hence, initial wealth determines occupational choice and aggregate economic activity. The model also generates an unequal wealth distribution endogenously through fair gambles undertaken voluntarily, despite agents being identical ex ante. If agents have an altruistic bequest motive, income and occupational differences can be perpetuated from generation to generation.

This collection brings together the classic papers on the economics of rent seeking. These papers date from Gordon Tullock's original 1967 paper which first put forth the idea that the pursuit of transfers was socially costly. Other classic papers by Anne Krueger and Richard Posner are included, as well as a series of more recent papers which trace the evolution of the literature on this important innovation in economic theory.