I wouldn’t go so strong as this.

The civil service is mostly designed to provide some level of basic stability and functioning so that no matter what flavor of the month politician gets elected you still get your trash picked up, and other services. (If politicians directly target something, though, all bets are off.)

Thank you for translating the analogy.

Why do we keep getting subjected to rent control, then, which never works?

Please demonstrate that it "never" works.

Can't prove a negative. But you can show a counterexample.

I know better than to waste time arguing with a doctrinaire libertarian.

Yet here you are arguing :-)

What is your definition of rent control working? There are some studies showing that rent control does work to minimise displacement of tenants [1] and that tenants seek more repairs [2], even more of lower income classes.

If you define as achieving market efficiency, maybe that's not the objective.

It's like unionising, it may make companies less market-efficient by giving more power and control to the workers. Rent control affects landlords by giving more power to tenants.

Building more houses, etc., is an orthogonal issue to rent control.

[1] http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/gyourk...

[2] https://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/RentControlMy...

What about the non-tenants who now cannot find a place to rent, because it's less profitable to build more apartments?

You could always [raise taxes and] subsidize apartment-building... the G.I. bill would like a word.

Government does plenty of things that are unprofitable for the benefit of all.

Switzerland has a pretty good policy for rent control and tenant housing [1].

This kind of policy needs to be a multipronged approach in policy to provide both new construction and long-term leases (usually 20 years).

[1] https://housingpolicytoolkit.oecd.org/www/CountryFiches/hous...

Because it actually often works and there has been research that has found benefits. The question is whether or not the benefits are worth the drawbacks and that's highly sensitive to your actual objectives, to the local conditions, and extremely sensitive to the details of how your rent control is implemented.

For example, it is an empirical fact that rent control greatly decreases the number of people that leave a city, which especially for poorer people means that they get to keep an invaluable support network.

At the same time, there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully and yet reduced rents.

So the assertion that it "never works" cannot be supported by the evidence because we have evidence of cases and dimensions in which it definitely worked. And that is part of the reason why some of us are subjected to rent control.

I find that this post https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... is a good start, the video by Unlearning Economics on the subject is also pretty good, which IIRC also touches on the issue that in the rent control debate an increase in the exact same metrics (for example, mobility) is interpreted by some as good and by others as bad.

I think there is a solid case to be made that when used carefully rent control can be a good tool to use in keeping housing costs under control, though of course if used as the only tool then things are likely to end up disastrously.

> there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully

Really? Would you build an apt building that rent control ensured would be a poor investment? How do you measure investors being reluctant to build more housing in a rent controlled area?

Rent control is good for the few people who get a below market rate. It's bad for everyone else, including those who can't find a place to rent because of it.

Rent control generally only controls increases, not absolute prices, and is relaxed for newer constructions, so developers care less. At the same time, it may reduce the cost of land zoned for high density housing if locative uses are judged to be less profitable, thereby reaching and equilibrium. It also often lowers market rent for everyone, when implemented correctly.

We can measure this reluctance by looking at construction rates and general supply in similar groups of cities or neighborhoods with or without rent control, of course controlling for other variables. This has been done in multiple studies, which are listed in the link I provided.

A recent video on co-op and social housing, that makes simlar points, with the somewhat clickbaity title of:

The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk

The video seems to switch to "non-market" as a description.

You don’t need the tools at all. If everyone is at (roughly) the same level of decision making ability as the post implies then it follows that disallowing certain decisions (like the price of rent) will always be suboptimal.

This is just pure and simple logic.

What ‘successes’ rent control had are hyped to an abnormal extent, since obviously those with rent controlled apartments are most keen on keeping them, and often they are not the ‘poor’. Again the poor are used here as an excuse for upper middle class bad behavior, locking people out of the city.

Turnover in a city is a good thing btw, not a bad one. But cities do seem to design themselves on keeping people out.

This is not true. Rational actors acting in their own self interest does not always approach a global optimum. An external actor limiting choices can trivially lead to better outcomes, the prisoner's dilemma being an obvious example. The tragedy of the commons is another, where the government historically either intervened to maintain good behaviour, or intervened to enclose the commons, in either case limiting the options of rational players.

Turnover in a city can be argued to be good or bad. Turnover across a city is more clearly bad, but as a said it's still arguable. In any case, I believe you're not making a great case as your basic argument that limiting choices of rational actors can never lead to better outcomes is incorrect, and I think it would be a good idea to read/watch the material I linked or referred to in order to get a better idea of what I'm arguing and so you can directly try to refute the rebuttals of points I'm going to be making. It's going to be faster than relitigating most of this conversation up until that point.

Rent control can, and sometimes does work. However, it has faltered in recent years, in large part because property management companies are using software to aid in pricing rents as high as the market can bear (to the heavy detriment of tenants), and are willing to evict and retain an unconscionable amount of empty units if overall profits rise, even at the cost of human suffering, rather than keep tenants around.

The latest "Behind the Bastards" podcast "Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?" explores some of this, if you have the time and inclination to listen.

> Rent control can, and sometimes does work

Only if you ignore the secondary effects, which are legion.

> retain an unconscionable amount of empty units

A secondary effect of rent control

There are thousands of empty units around without rent control. People cannot afford rent in them.

"Secondary effects" - please educate us on what they are, and their magnitude.

There are 48.5 million rental units in the US. A few thousand empty ones is miniscule.

I guess to put a finer point on it: this isn't exclusively a market problem, and it's incorrect to reduce/redirect all forms of market manipulation down to 'rent control'.

Certainly rent control distorts the market unnaturally, but it does so in favor of tenants and human rights, and proportionally speaking, I don't think it's the biggest distortion by a long shot. The much larger distortion causing the market problems is the optimization of rent prices at the expense of human rights.

If the market is to be distorted, I personally would pick the one that prioritizes continuity of housing over the one that maximizes rent income over total units rented.

but if he's a 10x then his 5 years of experience is actually 50 years!!! :O

Yeah jumping ship to a new company every 2 years is really valuable.

And they master the code at the new company in a few days!

Considering that's how people tend to get raises... he might be very smart for doing that!

2.5 years was the industry average like 5 years ago. Probably shorter now