Mapping Modern Economic Rents
A framework distinguishing value-creating activity from value-extracting economic rent across land, finance, and digital platforms.
Summary
This 2023 Cambridge Journal of Economics paper by Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins, and Giorgos Gouzoulis builds a modern framework for identifying economic rent — value extracted without corresponding value creation — across the contemporary economy.
Key Contribution
The authors extend the classical analysis of land rent to three domains: land and natural resources, finance, and digital platforms (network and data rents). They argue that distinguishing productive returns from extractive rents is essential for designing taxes and regulation, and that much of what is recorded as "profit" or "capital income" is in fact rent. The paper connects the Georgist tradition to current debates about platform monopolies and financialisation.
Why It Matters to the Wiki
The paper is the wiki's bridge between the classical land story and the modern rents debate: it treats land rent as the template case and asks which contemporary income flows share its extractive structure. Its three-domain map organizes several of the wiki's clusters — the FIRE-sector financial-rents analysis (Hudson's territory), the superstar-firms / platform-rents dispute, and the land-and-housing base (Ryan-Collins's own book). The wiki carries the market-power-vs-efficiency dispute over whether these flows ARE rents at full strength (Crouzet & Eberly on the challenge side); this framework paper takes the rent reading as its premise — report it as a framework, not a finding.
Bears On
- Outcome: Corporate profits are increasingly rents — the framework behind the dispute
- Concept: Economic Rent · FIRE Sector · Superstar Firms
- People: Michael Hudson · Josh Ryan-Collins · Mariana Mazzucato
Sources
- Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins & Giorgos Gouzoulis (2023), "Mapping modern economic rents," Cambridge Journal of Economics — used for the three-domain rent framework and the value-creation/extraction distinction (C-claims: peer-reviewed framework/interpretation, not empirical measurement). PDF · archived · 📄 Local copy