this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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That's a greatly oversimplified definition that would capture essentially all productive activity. If I paint someone's house and charge them more than the cost of paint, am I earning economic rent? As the owner of my tools and my own labor, the answer according to that definition would be yes.
In your hypothetical, you're paying the cost of bringing the painted house into production with your labor, not getting paid just for owning something.
A closer comparison would be landlords who claim "being a landlord is a job" because they pay themselves to paint the house (or other property management).
Being a landlord can be a kind of hybrid, it depends. If you just own land and collect rent while doing nothing to provide value to anybody then yes, all you're going is gatekeeping access to something that you didn't make which is basically the textbook definition of economic rent and it's parasitic. Using your labor and capital to build or maintain an improvement (like a house) and then leasing that out isn't economic rent, it actually is a real job just like any other, but only for the portion of the income that is due to the improvement; the lion's share of the income is almost always due to land ownership so it's still parasitism but with a garnish of legitimate work.
I don't think reading only the first sentence of the Wikipedia/Mirian-Webster definition in isolation is very helpful, you really have to dig deeper if you want to have a good sense of what economists are really trying to communicate with the concept of economic rent.