I don't think that's a fair take on the suggestion. What if it was something like Medicare where services were tax funded and costs are negotiated but fixed?

> Price controls are one of the few things that economists on both sides of the political aisle agree do not work, and/or have unintended consequences which are worse than the problem they attempt to resolve.

Australia effectively has price controls on both health and tertiary education. It isn’t perfect but it is hardly terrible.

I know the US pharmaceutical industry hates it - the Australian government uses its monopsony power to limit drug prices and hence drug company profits - and is forever lobbying the US government to use trade negotiations to pressure to undermine it (but hasn’t yet succeeded)

Universities can charge as much as they want - but if they want students to have full eligibility for government student loans and government tuition subsidies, there is a maximum they can charge. Students want that full eligibility, so for the majority of places they stick to the maximum

Sometimes it feels like economists come up with these ideas in an ivory tower, detached from reality. Any kind of price control seems to make economists very upset, rent control being another example.

Reality is that there are so many other factors that it’s probably better to have some sort of price control as a form of regulation, instead of only focusing on supply/demand levers.

I’m not an economist so I’m happy to be proven wrong, but the stance of “x,y and z policies need to be implemented so supply/demand is changed to mitigate these issues”, but the reality is that politicians and the business landscape doesn’t incentivize such changes. For example, colleges aren’t incentivized to keep the cost low, housing construction isn’t incentivized because NIMBYs control what can be built where, etc.

So when someone says “well the economists don’t agree on that”, it really rubs me the wrong way.

> Any kind of price control seems to make economists very upset, rent control being another example.

They're probably upset the same way that climate scientists get upset when people dispute climate change; that is, it's a widely-studied phenomenon by economists of all political persuasions with lots of evidence to back it up.

A price ceiling causes a shortage, like cars lining up at gas stations during the 70s oil crisis or the 10+ years of wait time in Stockholm apartments. A price floor causes a surplus, like unemployed workers at the minimum wage.

That is not a good comparison. Scientists that disagree with climate change are like a couple percent at max. Meanwhile nearly every economic topic, including price controls, would have double digits of economists disagreeing with it. Economics is not a hard science where you can take anything in absolutes.

Disagree. Climate science and economics are quite similar in this context, in that both an economy and a global environment are so massive and massively complex that neither can be isolated and studied in a controlled environment.

In such cases, when there does exist a consensus, it's probably correct.

I'd wager econlib is cherry picking https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-library-of-economics-and-...

Mainstream economists have thought very different things at different times. The current mainstream orthodoxy is largely free market fundamentalists that took over in the 80's. There are heterodox economists that disagree with this view. Practically, there are also many examples of price and rent controls and de-commodification "working" throughout modern history and currently on other countries.

I'd wager they aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

If you actually read the rest of my comment, I acknowledge mainstream (that is to say, neoclassical) economists don't like price controls, which is almost exactly what the wiki page says.

I did read your comment, and I blithely responded with another source supporting my original claim. In hindsight though, you're right: I should have simply picked apart your original argument instead of providing another source, as your argument is self-contradictory.

You argued that econlib cherry-picked economists to generate a biased result, which you then followed up by acknowledging that "mainstream" economists do not support price controls, which is exactly what the survey showed.

There is, in fact, a broad consensus among economists that price controls are generally counterproductive. Thanks for playing.

I think it goes without saying that if you don't include any voices of dissent, you get a remarkably consistent answer. That is still a bias.

I don't think you understand what bias is in this context.

To illustrate this, consider the following hypothetical survey.

Survey:

"Is murdering babies wrong"?

End Survey

Essentially everyone will respond with a strong yes.

By your logic, if I don't include a dissenting opinion, the poll is necessarily biased.

Of course that's not correct.

The purpose of a poll is to understand the opinions of a population by understanding the opinions of a randomly selected sample of the population. If the population has strong opinions on a given topic, the survey will return lopsided results. That does not make the survey biased.

If however you seek out people with opinions to the contrary for the sake of including unpopular opinions, THAT DOES bias the survey, because the survey sample is then no longer randomly selected.

I don't think you understand how diverse different schools of thought are in economics. To build on your example, it would be like asking "is abortion wrong?" to a group of religious fundamentalists. Ask a post-Keynesian what they think about price controls, or really, any school that's not a free market fundamentalist.

I don't think you understand how surveys work. The goal of a survey isn't to include everyone's opinion. The goal of a survey is to understand the overall opinion of the population. This is not difficult to understand, I feel like you're being deliberately obtuse to avoid having to admit you're wrong.

If you as an armchair expert disagree with the broad consensus of people who study something as a lifetime pursuit, your first thought should be that your knowledge is lacking, not that they are wrong. And if you find yourself seriously believing that they are wrong without understanding how they are wrong, then that should be a wake-up call that your thinking is clouded by bias.

That's not quite true. See for example the existence of the billions of $ of corporate agricultural subsidies, essentially creating an artificial price floor.

The primary reason price ceilings are criticized by "both sides" is because the shifting Overton window has resulted in both the Republican and Democratic parties having quite neoliberal views. In an international context the two sides of the aisle can be described as "right" and "far-right".

Paraphrasing the Onion -- "This policy doesn't work", agree politicians on both sides of the aisle in only country that has this problem.

You won't find many economists arguing against farm subsidies, which are a form of price control. This is among the oldest practices of statecraft in history.

Seems to work well in the UK. Fees are set by the government and the government provides the loans. Private Uni's can set their own price but the government loan will only only fund about £6k (£3k less than the public Uni fee). Because of this, many private Uni's set their fees at £6k and then make their money on international students.

That depends on what it means for this to be "working"