Rent-Seeking

‘Rent-seeking’ is the manipulation of a social or political environment in order to create personal wealth, as opposed to creating new wealth. Basically its people wanting more of the pie rather than just growing the pie so their piece is bigger.

In old economic theory the opposite to rent-seeking was ‘profit-seeking’, which is a focus on growing the pie.

I think we need to split ‘profit-seeking’ into sustainable and unsustainable categories. Profit-seeking via an unsustainable use of our diminishing and finite resources must now also considered to be a form of rent-seeking.