If anything, I think it was likely much, much worse in Smith's time and place. The British class system was incredibly strong and elites were essentially paid to not work.

I assure you, they barely knew the meaning of the word "labour".

Is it that way (genuinely asking) or is it a consequence of the way we write history being unkind?

I don't doubt for an instant that I work harder than QEII for example, but 2-300 years ago, a ruling class person would have probably worked somewhat hard, much like a CEO works today, since an entire ecosystem depended on the estate.

I doubt very much that a lord didn't understand what was bringing in the money for his estate, and the realities of what it means if the circumstances are not right to fulfil the criteria to bring in money.

(I sound like I'm advocating that this was a good thing or that I think they worked really hard, but I'm just postulating that we could be minimising their contributions based on our modern sensibilities and desire to dislike people of that class, and I include myself in that).

I think the criticism of that rentier class is based on them not contributing much so taking to role of owner rather than executive in today’s terms.

I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t want the Queen’s job.

Yeah, I’m slightly skeptical about claims that the head monarch of the UK doesn’t work hard. They have to do a lot of ceremonial things and voluntarily go to a bunch of other more philanthropic/PR/outreach things, even well into retirement age. I am still dubious as the value it provided but it’s definitely a kind of labor, given that it’s essentially expected.

In the past they’d not only have to do these tasks but also actually rule. Being a ruler in general sounds like a pretty sweet gig but I’d have to imagine it’s similar to being an upper level manager in that your entire day is filled with meetings and requests for meetings.

> while nowadays it's considered good.

Is it? I mean, I'm sure some people think it's good, but since the early 20th century I do think rentier income has increasingly been viewed as parasitic. If anything, I'd have said that the view that people should make their income by working rather than having stuff is much more mainstream now than in Smith's time.

Investors make money because of the money they already had, based on work that other people do. But investment is often (though not universally) considered good.

Id argue that active investment, seeking out good companies and deploying capital where it can do the most good growing companies and employing people, is valuable work.

Passive investment less so, but I think the remedy for that is decently high death duties and inheritance taxes. The more we close loopholes in those the better.

> Passive investment less so

i argue the opposite - most people are not smart enough to know what investment is going to give the highest return. Passively invest means you let the market decide, and spend your time to improve your own worth and output.

But often the people who have large amounts of capital pay someone else to actively manage it for them.

Does the view that rentier income is parasitic extend to retirees and non-working recipients of social services or welfare?

Look at the top valuations, it's mostly rentier income.

I wouldn’t say it is necessarily considered good. Someone or something is always working for it.

Every company out there has, wants, or wishes they could transform their goods or services into recurring revenue. The Apple “cloud” pivot contributed heavily to their market cap growth to and above 1T. Literal rent seeking.

Providing a service is working. Updating maps; upgrading software; enhancing services; improving security; supporting, provisioning and refreshing back end hardware. That’s all work. They have thousands of employees and thousands more contractors working on maps alone, and that’s not even a paid product.

Not at all. The majority of the profit of new-feudal companies come from a dominant position on the market. Same as rent-seeking when you own 80% of a city.

The cost of the work required to provide those services is marginal - as clearly proven by the big profit margins.

Oh and those "free" services are paid by selling your privacy.

I was addressing the actual example given, so yes, ‘at all’. The fact there are other companies that are rent seeking is a separate point. You’re seriously saying Apple specifically, the company called out, sells privacy? Do tell.

As for Market dominance, since when was being popular and making products a lot of people like and value somehow abhorrent?

> As for Market dominance, since when was being popular and making products a lot of people like and value somehow abhorrent?

Please argue in good faith...

https://www.oecd.org/competition/abuse/

I am arguing in good faith. The example specifically called out, not by me, was Apple. If the majority of Apples profits come from market abuse, how do you explain the fact that their profit margins now are about the same as they were when they were a small minority player in markets? In fact they still are in most of the markets they compete in.

Surely market abuse should allow them to significantly expand profitability, but it hasn’t. Overall profits yes, but that’s just because they have higher sales now.

There are some companies I would agree do abuse their positions significantly to distort markets. Google and Facebook have been caught explicitly doing so.

Right and you don’t own anything. Just purchase some amount of service periodically at a steep markup. The mbas saw what was going on in services and wanted to turn everything into a similarly periodic transaction.

I have an iPhone, don't pay a penny in recurring services, and it all works fine. I do have a Backblaze subscription for my desktop, which I'm very happy with. With private relay I'm seriously considering signing up with a paid iCloud account though. I mean how is that abusive, but a paid VPN subscription is considered a leet hacker move for those in the know? It's just snobbery.

> I mean how is that abusive, but a paid VPN subscription is considered a leet hacker move for those in the know?

From what I've seen it's not really those "in the know", but rather those convinced by half-assed explanations of what paid VPN subscriptions do by YouTube sponsorships.

That’s not what rent-seeking means

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html

If you buy a vacant property and hold onto it until population growth and lack of development brings prices up, who is working?

New entrants, the people who have to pay a million dollars for a small house has to work for that million.

I don't think that makes sense. It applies to almost any transaction. Those people will be working and earning regardless, it's just that a higher proportion of their income will be devoted to accommodation.

Whoever buys it or rents it

> even called parasitic

I do not recall this from WoN.

Quote please.

> As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

as well as

> They [landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.

Exactly I was thinking about the first one.

The internet giants "reap where they never sowed".

I just don’t think that argument is viable. They provide ongoing highly valued services people choose to pay for. Advertising for Google and Facebook, retail and hosting services for Amazon, physical products and online services for Apple, etc. They employ hundreds of thousands of people, are constantly updating and extending their products and services. That’s all serious work done by actual people.

I’m not justifying everything they do, or all their business practices, but if these companies didn’t provide those services someone else would. There’s a genuine need.

I completely disagree.

Well, their customers do agree and that's what actually matters, regardless of what you and I think.

Neither of which is Smith asserting rents are parasitic.

He describes economics; others put opinions into his words.

"Parasitic" can be descriptive? I means roughly someone that takes from a system without giving to or benefiting it.

Parasitic does have a fairly strong negative connotation, and Smith doesn't literally use the word, but those two passages do seem to have somewhat of a negative connotation to them, to my reading.

I am quite sure the discourse on "rent seeking activities" come with a negative connotation in the wealth of nations. (forgive me if I am wrong, it is some years ago I read it)

That's what I got out of it to. From his tone, he was completely against rent seeking.

Are you going to find any zingers in Smith?

The writing style is utter treacle to me at least, and I set out to give it a go under my own steam (i.e. not for a class or similar)

If you want a completely underplayed side of Smith, you can also read "The theory of moral sentiments".

The only thing being spun about WoN is this article

Not changed: Rent-seeking is good for people who collect, and bad for people who pay.

What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.

> What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.

In today's inflation-targeting macroeconomic framework, automation causes a decrease in the price of goods and labour, which would have a deflationary impact. To prevent structural deflation, interest rates are reduced, which increases the value of assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.

So I think automation can also support rent-seeking, although more indirectly.

> What's changed: automation creating value automatically, different from rent-seeking.

Nothing new. Industrialization in the 19th century was all about automation and created both poverty and inequality for factory workers.

Factory workers were paid several times as much as agricultural labourers, that’s why they went to work in factories. Industrialisation also drastically reduced the cost and increased the quality of manufactured goods including basics like dyed cloth, bread, soap, etc making them much more affordable to people.

> Factory workers were paid several times as much as agricultural labourers

This generalization is historically false. Please inform yourself.

> Making money without working was frought upon in Smith days

So what? Why would it automatically matter if Smith thought x y z? People were wrong about a great many things back then, including in the realm of morality.

Aristotle was wrong about a lot of things. Plato was wrong about a lot of things. They come across as mystical morons in hindsight. Freud was wrong about a lot of things.

Should it be surprising for Smith to be wrong about a lot of things? Of course not.

It's entirely moral to make money off of your money with minimum effort. For example having retirement capital that consists of a low cost S&P 500 index fund. It is not parasitic, even if Adam Smith incorrectly might think so. Were he alive today and were he to believe such to be immoral, his morality would be irrational, anti-human and plainly askew.

The notion of not earning money on your money because it'd be immoral or parasitic, is comically dumb. It's about as regressive as burning witches. It's morally, philosophically and functionally identical to saying you shouldn't repetitively yield from land (ie farming is immoral), that you shouldn't amplify your physical labor with tools, and forbid you repetitively yield from land with heavily automated machinery, much less machinery that you use more than once (it just keeps producing a return on investment from the deployed capital, a horrible sin!). And then there's saving money to buy things in bulk on greater discount. How dare anyone yield additional money from their immoral hoard of existing money.

In the Islamic world it is against the law to pay or demand interest on money lent. The idea is more universal and less witchcraft.

Of course the Islamic banking world also has complicated ways to get around this limitation and in practice they do charge interest.

Spain approved it's "Ley de la Usura" in 1908 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_de_la_Usura

> It's entirely moral to make money off of your money with minimum effort. For example having retirement capital that consists of a low cost S&P 500 index fund. It is not parasitic, even if Adam Smith incorrectly might think so.

I don't follow -- how does the fact that the money is used for retirement or in a low cost fund make it not parasitic? It seems to me to fit the definition pretty well.