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I said that his assertion that rent control is "widely considered a failure everywhere it has been implemented" is wrong. It's "widely considered" a failure by

• tptacek 11y ago
  If by "certain ideologies" you mean "pretty much all the ideologies", then yes. The belief that rent control policies inflict more costs than benefits in the market for housing is notorious as one of the few conclusions of economics held across the ideological spectrum, from conservative to liberal, statist to libertarian, Keynsian to Hayekian. Paul Krugman thinks it doesn't work. Brad DeLong thinks it doesn't work. Dean Baker thinks it doesn't work. Tyler Cowen and Russ Robers think it doesn't work. Kenneth Rogoff thinks it doesn't work. Counterexamples welcome. Can you find a prominent economist speaking out in favor of it, in any setting, in any real detail? Here's a starting point for the other side, written by two Nobel-winners: http://c457332.r32.cf2.rackcdn.com/pdf/books/Roofs_or_Ceilings.pdf http://c457332.r32.cf2.rackcdn.com/pdf/books/Roofs_or_Ceilin... Slightly later: This paper is a great read, by the way; as close to a long-form Reddit comment as you could expect from something written in 1946 --- and about San Francisco, no less! Friedman and Stigler take dead aim at the argument that a free market for housing somehow benefits the rich. The rich can already sidestep rent control: they simply purchase, instead of renting. Meanwhile, the perverse incentives of rent control coerce some people who would be better served by renting into buying, which then commits them to speculative investments in real estate, further exacerbating the problem.
  • timr 11y ago
    No, I meant what I wrote. "belief that rent control policies inflict more costs than benefits in the market for housing is notorious as one of the few conclusions of economics held across the ideological spectrum" Define your terms. What does "inflict more costs than benefits" mean? What specific policies are we debating? Stop arguing a straw man ("rent control") by referring to the authority of "economists agree", and you'll realize that there is an easy, clear argument for the other side here: social stability. The only thing that "economists agree" upon, is that price caps lead to shortages in efficient markets. That's it. They vehemently disagree when you start asking about policies that don't cap prices, but instead, aim to control the rate of increase in prices in order to reward long-term occupancy. Moreover, there are huge differences in circumstance that must be considered in order to have a productive debate: in a place like Houston, where land is cheap, the arguments for rent control are far weaker than in San Francisco, where Global Wealth has suddenly, spastically decided that this tiny, 47-square-mile city is where All the Monies belong, as of ~2010. (Great for Global Wealth, but bad for the people who lived here before the rich gained a new investment fetish!) I'll make this easy for you: your argument is that "rent control" is bad because economists say it's bad, and #{STANDARD_FREE_MARKET_ARGUMENT_GOES_HERE}. Fine. Mine is that the real world is more complicated than economic theory, and that while "the free market" may be better at allocating wealth efficiently (that is, indeed, all the free market does), there's a higher value: the moral right of occupancy is worth some economic inefficiency. We should provide incentives for long-term tenancy, because such tenancy produces social stability that is better for all of us in the long run. I don't automatically value the free market because someone told me that it's good in econ 101 -- in this case, I hold another value paramount.
    • tptacek 11y ago
      No part of the paper I just provided to you relies on efficient market theory. Which is unsurprising, because the paper predates it by something like 15 years. You began this subthread with the words "I think what you meant to say is that rent control is widely considered a failure by certain rich people...", concluding "there is more light than heat" in the debate. I responded. No, I pointed out: rent control has been considered extensively by dispassionate economists, and, across the ideological spectrum, the conclusion has strongly tended to be that it's a bad idea. I don't have anything more to contribute to the discussion than that; I wanted only to rebut the notion that opposition to rent control was a special pleading by the rich in favor of their own interests. The opposite is, I think, true. You may of course yet be able to demonstrate that rent control in some form is a good idea. But you'll have to do it on the merits. I don't think the argument that opposition to rent control is a manipulative tool of the wealthy can survive the evidence.