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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

>Serial experimentation with this policy has repeatedly shown the same result.

New York's two largest building booms took place during times of very strict rent controls - the 1920s and between 1947 and 1965.

>rent control looks like a victory for the poor over the landlord class. But the stifling of price signals leads to problems.

Except when it actually happened the price signals sent by the strictest rent controls still weren't enough to end the city's biggest housing booms.

Seriously, Megan McArdle telling you that price controls are "just going to hurt the poor" is a bit like Trump telling you that demolishing Mar a Lago will only hurt the immigrants.

Rent control is a dirty hack, for sure, but it's a dirty hack that shouldn't be removed until a proper fix is put in place - i.e. a land value tax.

I won't hold my breath for Megan McArdle to advocate for that.

Bloomberg should have her fired. She does absolutely no credit to their publication.

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You may get downvoted to hell for, er, speaking the truth?

I'm afraid you're right and Miss McArdle is really nothing much more than a libertarian hack.

Case in point: Her book review fo Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". While opinions may certainly differ about the tome this is a bit rich for a book review:

  I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read. To be clear, I intend to read Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It is sitting on my (virtual) bedside with a big stack of other (digital) books that I intend to read. But it’s far down in the queue, and I’m afraid that I can’t wait to weigh in—not on the book itself, but on its topic.

Reviews a book she hasn't read and needless to say completely trashes it in the process.

I actually agree: Bloomberg really should have her fired.

I link to the Baffler article[1] since the original review is apparently only available to subscribers.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/latest/what-pikettys-conservative-cri...

Talking about books that you haven't read. [1]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/06/fiction.societ...

Signaling that you haven't read it gives one a defensible position! You can't criticize my mischaracterization of the arguments of the book, I haven't read it! Her opinions can be her alternative facts known to none except her.

There is accidental fallacious logic, and then there is manufacturing bullshit.

There were bloggers whose raison d'être was debunking her. IDK if they've moved to twitter or not:

https://inversesquare.wordpress.com/tag/mcardle/

The lesson is, glibertarians always fail up.

Both of those building booms were shortly after world war one and world war two. Can you really make any fair comparisons based on that?

The entire US economy was booming after the war. So numbers from that period don't tell you much about what things would have been like in peace time.

Except I'm not claiming that the rent controls stimulated the boom. Just that the correlation posited by Megan McArdle absent any supporting data is imagined.

> Bloomberg should have her fired. She does absolutely no credit to their publication.

I don't think calling for everyone you disagree with to be fired is the right way forward.

>I don't think calling for everyone you disagree with to be fired is the right way forward.

I don't think conflating a specific person with everyone is a fair reading of the OP's statement.

Calling for the firing of a book reviewer who didn't read the book seems eminently reasonable to me.

I love the part where you started out with a correlation (which is very weak evidence, especially without any citation) and then proceeded to some assertions (also without evidence or citations), ending in an ad-hominem

https://fee.org/articles/the-case-against-rent-control/

You did notice that neither her link nor yours contains any data whatsoever right?

I gave two data points that strongly indicated that the effect rent control has on construction is either absent or very, very weak. You wouldn't exactly get the highest rate of construction coinciding with the strictest rent controls otherwise now would you?

You didn't give two data points, you gave four unsourced assertions (two for building booms, two for strictness of rent controls), devoid of any rigour (was the building boom even in housing? Or was it mostly commercial?) or control for any of the thousands of potential external factors.

But even if what you assert actually is true, it hardly is a rebuttal to the article. Her unsourced assertions actually do line up with a century of research and hundreds of empirical studies on the effect of rent control specifically, not to mention the much larger body of research on price controls in general. It isn't necessary for someone who is backed by scientific consensus to laboriously review an enormous body of research that supports their premise before making a policy recommendation. Only those who are speaking against the consensus benefit from an empirical review.

I'm actually in agreement with you on land value taxes. It's something that is long overdue. But even with land value taxes, land is only valued at the highest best use that is zoned and permitted to be built. And that's the true underlying problem.

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