Rent of nightgown...

Rent of my pajamas, 25 cents.

You owing me two months' rent, and you want me to lend you money?

Mr. Adams owed her six weeks' rent in her best lodge at 55.

By many measures, global inequality has been reduced significantly over the past three decades, implying that capitalism has succeeded spectacularly. Capitalism has perhaps eroded rents that workers in advanced countries enjoy by virtue of where they were born.

After all, high levels of growth translate into large rents that can, through corrupt practices, be distributed to the officials themselves, as well as to their friends and protégé. Eliminate such practices, the logic goes, and officials will be unable to reap large rewards from economic growth and thus will be less motivated to encourage it.

But those numbers are changing, as the Internet enables creative new business models that increase not only a market s efficiency but also the utilization of our various assets. Hundreds of experiments are being conducted.

Airbnb and Uber have demonstrated that disruption from another industry is particularly powerful, because it involves enabling efficiency enhancing structural changes that draw on core competencies and strategies that the incumbent firms lack. Many other companies (for example, Rent the Runway, which provides short term rentals of higher end fashion) are in the process of doing the same thing.