a lot of this is shocking and depressing (e.g., this book taught me about patent troll firms), as one would expect from a book about how well-connected rich people can distribute wealth upwards without creating new products or services. the authors do a good job at describing how rent seeking operates in different sectors while still tying them to the same underlying dysfunction.

but the book's biggest fault is that it, for all attempts to demonstrate the existence of rents in various sectors and quantify their magnitudes, the authors never really attempt to quantify each category of rent seeking's contribution to either lost productivity or increased inequality. a great example of this is rognlie's critique of piketty, cited by the authors as evidence of the harm done by land use regulation. rognlie claims that rising net capital share of income is entirely attributable to the housing sector. if this is true, then housing/land use regulation makes all the other rent-seeking sectors way less relevant! if increased inequality is entirely explained by housing's contribution to net capital income, why not write a pro-yimby book? without direct comparison, i'm not really convinced that occupational licensing regimes and land use regulations even affect productivity and inequality on the same scale, as the authors made no attempt to convince me otherwise. this is relevant for an anti-rent seeking political movement spending scarce political/attentional capital.

speaking of solutions,the section on solutions--"rent proofing politics"--seemed naive and underdeveloped to me. rent seeking is bad. it should stop. but the solutions, particularly the part about increasing research capacity of congress, seem like tacked-on afterthoughts. i would prefer them to be more fully fleshed out.

overall, an interesting primer on rent seeking and how bad it is, but it left me with questions that could have been answered if it was only 50-75 pages longer. or, it could have just been an extended article-blog post outlining the pernicious effects of rent seeking without adding on the chapter on solutions.