Matt Mitchell is the director and senior research fellow at the Equity Initiative at the Mercatus Center. He joins the show today to talk about rent seeking and how it affects long term economic growth and prosperity. David and Matt also discuss regulatory capture, the rise of patent trolls, and the economics of public choice theory.   Transcript for the episode: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/12172018/macroeconomics-rent-seeking   Matt’s Twitter: @MattMitchell80 Matt’s Mercatus profile: https://www.mercatus.org/matthew-mitchell   Related Links:   *Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty* by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson https://scholar.harvard.edu/jrobinson/publications/why-nations-fail-origins-power-prosperity-and-poverty   *The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society* by Anne Krueger https://www.jstor.org/stable/1808883?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents   *Entrepreneurship: Production, Unproductive, and Destructive* by William Baumol https://www.jstor.org/stable/2937617   *Uncontestable Favoritism* by Matt Mitchell https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3210953   *40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking* by Roger Congleton, Arye Hillman, and Kai Konrad https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783540791881   David’s blog: macromarketmusings.blogspot.com David’s Twitter: @DavidBeckworth