this should have been a much longer or a much shorter book. published in 2017, it was very "of its time" in that its motivation is clearly to protect liberal democracy against authoritarian populists. the book's core claim is that increasing inequality and slowing growth are attributable to rent seeking: "an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth" (Wikipedia). lindsey and teles claim, correctly, that there many areas of american economic life affected by rent seeking, but they focus on four: financial regulation, intellectual property, occupational licensing, and land use regulations.

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 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.