Another leading thinker, the US economist Joseph Stiglitz, has explored how weak regulation and monopolistic practices have allowed what economists call ‘rent extraction’, which he sees as the main impetus behind the rise of the 1 per cent in the US.10 For Stiglitz, this rent is the income obtained by creating impediments to other businesses, such as barriers to prevent new companies from entering a sector, or deregulation that has allowed finance to become disproportionately large in relation to the rest of the economy.
