Good idea. Weak article. The HBR article cited [1] is an obituary for William Baumol. Baumol is associated more with the "cost disease" problem - high productivity industries shrink over time, as their market saturates. Agriculture and manufacturing in the US have great productivity, and are constantly shrinking employment while increasing output. US manufacturing output is at an all-time high, but is down to 8.1% of the labor force. Agriculture is at 1.4%.[2] So business growth has to be in low-productivity sectors, with low wages. That's cost disease.
If you want to read about rent seeking, read Peter Theil's "Zero to One". It's a manual on rent-seeking. It's all about how to create a monopoly.
Changing Government policy to reduce rent-seeking is very tough politically. Successful rent-seekers are the biggest political contributors. They pay to not have their income stream cut off.
But cost disease can, at most, account for growth in prices that follows the growth in salary paid to the most productive professions, no? Because if so the price increase of health care and college (which is the two big expenditures) _cannot_ be explained by cost-disease alone, as they have both grown much higher than salaries.
If you want to read about rent seeking, read Peter Theil's "Zero to One". It's a manual on rent-seeking. It's all about how to create a monopoly.
Changing Government policy to reduce rent-seeking is very tough politically. Successful rent-seekers are the biggest political contributors. They pay to not have their income stream cut off.
[1] https://hbr.org/2017/06/is-america-encouraging-the-wrong-kin... [2] https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm