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The critical insight is that rational actors often find it more profitable to manipulate the rules of the game than to play it well. When the return on lobbying exceeds the return on innovation, talent flows from production to extraction, and societies stagnate not from lack of ability but from misallocated ambition. Rent-seeking explains why some resource-rich nations stay poor while resource-poor nations thrive — it's not what you have, it's whether your incentives reward creating or capturing.
