Interpersonal Intellectual Rent

I am going to be distracted for the rest of the night if I don't finish this one, it seems.

I was stumped as of bedtime last night as to how one could have a marginal rent theory for interpersonal intellectual rents, and was still trying to work out exactly what is being invested, and what the gain really is. So, after continuation of yesterday's conversation, here's the solution to the rent problem I was amused by in my last post. I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the details getting from this to something which really uses marginal theory concepts well, but maybe that will be tomorrow night's post.


When people talk things out aloud, either to stuffed animals, or to their cat, or to someone who isn't really being responsive, they often find that in just saying their ideas out loud they gain additional insight or clarification of their ideas. For the sake of my model, I am sticking to the idea of threads of thought here, that one gains new or improved threads of ideas or equivalently of understanding. This initial case yields no rent, just a profit on one's own mental efforts through the work of ordering and examining one's ideas.

Conversing with a person who occasionally asks a fruitful question by accident or in ignorance may yield a slightly gain than the previous case, not by virtue only of one's labor, but by way of otherwise non-productive characteristics of the conversation partner. This extra gain is a small rent.

Conversation with an intellectual equal with respect to the topic being discussed will yield a much higher gain for the same amount of time and effort. This gain is more complicated, but ultimately the ideas in my head from such a conversation, if they are assimilated into my own collection of intellectual threads, represent my own work, even if they originated within the partner's brain. I still had to think through them and evaluate them to assimilate them. These new threads and modifications of my old threads represent shortcuts, saving me time and effort I would have had to expend to reach these same ideas on my own, just as the occasional accidental questions would, only to a much greater extent. Thus, from interacting with this partner, I've gained a higher amount in rent, plus the gain from my own work which is still my profit.

Rent can then be expressed in terms of the time saved, from not having to think through the longer route to the gained understanding/'threads'. This time can then be converted to some sort of labor-value equivalent to allow one to measure such gains against other goods. Thus I could perhaps work out an equation to approximate just how much I owe Paul, for instance, for his economist reference by which I gained rent in the conversation that started all this, and for his inputs towards the model I've laid out here tonight. Of course, he has since gained some understanding of marginalist economics from my inputs into our conversations, so perhaps some of that rent has been exchanged in kind, at least for today's conversation.

A sort of balance of trade model of interpersonal interactions, using this idea of rents, might help in modeling the dynamics of friendship, collaborations and marital conflicts, by allowing dynamics of such relationships to be abstracted, to yield more general patterns that can guide interpretation of particular relationship dynamics. This rent idea could capture at least an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as 'quality time,' too, since one could probably substitute other gains, like interest, esteem, or emotional support, and derive similar rent patterns. A spouse complaining of an imbalance in their marital relationship may very well be responding to an intuitive summation of rents that don't balance, perhaps.

(And now, it really is time that I go back to political theory land again and finish the essay this line of thought was interposing itself into.)