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> Is there a clear consensus that this is the case? There is a consensus in economics, that rent control is bad idea. Inasmuch as economics can be considered a

by sampo 6y ago

> Is there a clear consensus that this is the case? There is a consensus in economics, that rent control is bad idea. Inasmuch as economics can be considered a science, supporting rent control is an anti-science position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/ https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/19/rent-control-will-make-housing-shortages-worse https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/19/rent-control-wi...

tgaj 6y ago
Economics is note really a science.
chalst 6y ago
You have linked to no scholarly papers, and the Wikipedia article seems to carefully avoid stating there is the consensus you claim. Are you aware that there is no consensus in economics that rents are determined by the interaction between a determinate upwards-sloping supply curve, representing landlord's willingness to so many units at any given price, and a likewise downwards-sloping demand curve for renter's disposition? Many of the just-so stories about Econ 101 assume this is so.
- sampo 6y ago
  > Wikipedia article seems to carefully avoid stating there is the consensus you claim. Ctrl+f consensus, and you find: "There is a consensus among economists that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of rental housing units."
  - chalst 6y ago
    Found it - that's remarkably lame: an assertion that there is a consensus, "backed up" by a reference saying to see the "Economists views" section for references, which is a broken internal link. No problem, I edit Wikipedia and SOFIXIT applies. Since many economists have woken up to the failure of the "price determined by intersection of buyer-demand and seller-supply curves" thesis following the spectacular failure of this fitting the facts in the case of the minimal wage as documented by Krueger and Card in the 80s, there is today no such consensus.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      We're still waiting for at least one well known economist's opinion to the contrary. As for minimal wage - there is a consensus about it, you just fail to mention what the consensus is... (are you an economist?)
      - chalst 6y ago
        > We're still waiting I don't recall you asking me for a name, but if you insist, is Richard Arnott [1] good enough for you? He wrote the highly cited "Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?" You can explore the reaction of the economics profession to his arguments on Google Scholar [3]. He cites the figure of 93% of eonomists opposing rent control, which then could be considered a consensus, but that was before the work of Krueger and Card cast a shadow on these orthodoxies coming from simplistic marginalist arguments whose empirical support was weak anecdotal evidence. Today there is no such consensus. Incidentally, between the period of the perceived success of the New Deal and the pro-interventionist era immediately following WW2, there was also a consensus of economists on this question, but the opposite one: rent controls were viewed as a good thing. [1]: http://www.narsc.org/newsite/internal/richard-j-arnott/ http://www.narsc.org/newsite/internal/richard-j-arnott/ [2]: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.1.99 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.1.99 [3]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1157340330382125689&as_sdt=5,39&sciodt=7,39&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1157340330382125689...
        JAlexoid 6y ago
        Wait! Who said that there's no consensus. The only thing that you presented, so far, is that 93% of economists oppose rent controls. And from what I read is that there's a debate into how much rent control is OK for the overall economy. Not really a change about its negative impact on the rental market.
        chalst 6y ago
        93% is generally evidence of consensus among the sampled group at that time. That time is past, but here and on Wikipedia there are people arguing there is currently a consensus among "economists" (unqualified). So far I have not seen anything I would count as a current consensus, and I don't believe there is one. It's also worth noticing a bait and switch here. The former consensus was that hard rent ceilings reduce the quality and quantity of supply. Then you see claims that its uncontroversial Econ 101 that any kind of rent control is bad for cities. If justification for the latter claim is sought, it is justified by the past-expiry-date evidence for the former claim. It's a good example of what Scott Alexander calls a motte and bailey argument.
jacobolus 6y ago
Steven Levitt, Walter Block, and The Economist magazine are hardly representative of the full diversity of opinions of professional economists. You have one economist who spends his time moonlighting dubiously in a variety of fields he has no expertise in, one famous anti-government ideologue who works at a corporate-funded think tank (example quotation: "there is a presumption that all government employees are indeed guilty of a crime against humanity. This presumption can of course be rebutted in any number of ways, but, given that the unjust government is an organized institutional machine of aggression and initiatory violence, there is no doubt that any serious libertarian analysis ought to start out with this presumption as its basic premise"), and one center-right pro-free-market magazine written with no bylines by overconfident 20-something Oxbridge grads with limited life experience and limited subject-matter expertise.
- sampo 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation#Economists'_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation#Economists'_vi...
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  It's like saying that Nature(magazine) doesn't represent a diversity of opinions on evolution.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    What are you talking about? These two publications are not remotely comparable. Nature is a prestigious academic journal full of peer-reviewed science papers written by scientists (in various fields, including evolutionary biology). The Economist is a weekly news magazine written by young journalists with no special expertise. It is not an academic publication and its authors are not economists.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      > The Economist is a weekly news magazine Exactly. They report news and what reputable economists have to say. With sources and quotes. A lot of their articles would be considered a review article in Nature magazine. > young journalists with no special expertise That's literally a logical fallacy. Instead of reading about the sources for the particular article, you're dismissing The Economist like it's a tabloid. Tells me more about your integrity, more than you wish to expose.

by sampo 6y ago

tgaj 6y ago

Economics is note really a science.

chalst 6y ago

You have linked to no scholarly papers, and the Wikipedia article seems to carefully avoid stating there is the consensus you claim. Are you aware that there is no consensus in economics that rents are determined by the interaction between a determinate upwards-sloping supply curve, representing landlord's willingness to so many units at any given price, and a likewise downwards-sloping demand curve for renter's disposition? Many of the just-so stories about Econ 101 assume this is so.

sampo 6y ago
> Wikipedia article seems to carefully avoid stating there is the consensus you claim. Ctrl+f consensus, and you find: "There is a consensus among economists that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of rental housing units."
- chalst 6y ago
  Found it - that's remarkably lame: an assertion that there is a consensus, "backed up" by a reference saying to see the "Economists views" section for references, which is a broken internal link. No problem, I edit Wikipedia and SOFIXIT applies. Since many economists have woken up to the failure of the "price determined by intersection of buyer-demand and seller-supply curves" thesis following the spectacular failure of this fitting the facts in the case of the minimal wage as documented by Krueger and Card in the 80s, there is today no such consensus.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    We're still waiting for at least one well known economist's opinion to the contrary. As for minimal wage - there is a consensus about it, you just fail to mention what the consensus is... (are you an economist?)
    - chalst 6y ago
      > We're still waiting I don't recall you asking me for a name, but if you insist, is Richard Arnott [1] good enough for you? He wrote the highly cited "Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?" You can explore the reaction of the economics profession to his arguments on Google Scholar [3]. He cites the figure of 93% of eonomists opposing rent control, which then could be considered a consensus, but that was before the work of Krueger and Card cast a shadow on these orthodoxies coming from simplistic marginalist arguments whose empirical support was weak anecdotal evidence. Today there is no such consensus. Incidentally, between the period of the perceived success of the New Deal and the pro-interventionist era immediately following WW2, there was also a consensus of economists on this question, but the opposite one: rent controls were viewed as a good thing. [1]: http://www.narsc.org/newsite/internal/richard-j-arnott/ http://www.narsc.org/newsite/internal/richard-j-arnott/ [2]: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.1.99 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.1.99 [3]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1157340330382125689&as_sdt=5,39&sciodt=7,39&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1157340330382125689...
      - JAlexoid 6y ago
        Wait! Who said that there's no consensus. The only thing that you presented, so far, is that 93% of economists oppose rent controls. And from what I read is that there's a debate into how much rent control is OK for the overall economy. Not really a change about its negative impact on the rental market.
        chalst 6y ago
        93% is generally evidence of consensus among the sampled group at that time. That time is past, but here and on Wikipedia there are people arguing there is currently a consensus among "economists" (unqualified). So far I have not seen anything I would count as a current consensus, and I don't believe there is one. It's also worth noticing a bait and switch here. The former consensus was that hard rent ceilings reduce the quality and quantity of supply. Then you see claims that its uncontroversial Econ 101 that any kind of rent control is bad for cities. If justification for the latter claim is sought, it is justified by the past-expiry-date evidence for the former claim. It's a good example of what Scott Alexander calls a motte and bailey argument.

jacobolus 6y ago

Steven Levitt, Walter Block, and The Economist magazine are hardly representative of the full diversity of opinions of professional economists. You have one economist who spends his time moonlighting dubiously in a variety of fields he has no expertise in, one famous anti-government ideologue who works at a corporate-funded think tank (example quotation: "there is a presumption that all government employees are indeed guilty of a crime against humanity. This presumption can of course be rebutted in any number of ways, but, given that the unjust government is an organized institutional machine of aggression and initiatory violence, there is no doubt that any serious libertarian analysis ought to start out with this presumption as its basic premise"), and one center-right pro-free-market magazine written with no bylines by overconfident 20-something Oxbridge grads with limited life experience and limited subject-matter expertise.

sampo 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation#Economists'_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_regulation#Economists'_vi...
JAlexoid 6y ago
It's like saying that Nature(magazine) doesn't represent a diversity of opinions on evolution.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  What are you talking about? These two publications are not remotely comparable. Nature is a prestigious academic journal full of peer-reviewed science papers written by scientists (in various fields, including evolutionary biology). The Economist is a weekly news magazine written by young journalists with no special expertise. It is not an academic publication and its authors are not economists.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    > The Economist is a weekly news magazine Exactly. They report news and what reputable economists have to say. With sources and quotes. A lot of their articles would be considered a review article in Nature magazine. > young journalists with no special expertise That's literally a logical fallacy. Instead of reading about the sources for the particular article, you're dismissing The Economist like it's a tabloid. Tells me more about your integrity, more than you wish to expose.