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Rent Control – Careful What You Wish For
This apparently obvious and attractive but fatally flawed notion has become attractive again….
| Alex Tabarrok on July 2, 2026 at Marginal Revolution Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap. Norway abolished its rent control in 1982, and the economist Are Oust realized the newspapers had been quietly recording the whole experiment. He collected housing classifieds from Oslo’s Aftenposten from 1970 to 2008 and watched the market turn inside out. Under rent control, Oslo’s listings pages looked nothing like a housing market. It was tenants who advertised, pleading their qualities to landlords — “housing wanted” ads outnumbered “housing for rent.” Ten to fifteen percent of those ads were placed by the tenant’s employer, vouching for them the way a bank vouches for a borrower. Tenants offered babysitting, gardening, snow-shoveling, and janitorial work on the side to sweeten the deal. Landlords, for their part, could demand a tenant of a particular gender, age, occupation, region of origin — some ads specified “strong Christian beliefs.” Deposits commonly ran to 50 or 60 months’ rent, occasionally 100 or more: tenants effectively lent the landlord the equity of the flat, interest free. And only about 20 percent of “for rent” ads dared print the rent, much of which would have been illegal. Then the ceiling lifted. Within a few years the page flipped: landlords advertised to tenants, roughly 80 percent of listings printed an asking rent, the mega-deposits vanished, and the demands for snow-shoveling Christians of specified gender dwindled to nothing. The price went back to doing the rationing — so nothing else had to. Check out the whole thing–it’s fabulous. |
What is a Govt Job?
In hawking around their various positions the government and the media and unions and employers have invented vast and complex debates about how many jobs have been created and/or lost. All fun and games and the source of endless debate and calculation.
It is difficult to get away from the proposition, it seems to me, that from a taxpayers point of view the critical point is simply whether the government payroll, adjusted for inflation, has gone up or down. Whether that payroll should have gone up or down is another matter involving quite separate considerations largely concerned with what value the taxpayer gets from the expenditure and whether or not that “value” is wanted.
There is no doubt great debate to be had over those matters but it seems ill advised to continue to waft endlessly over what should and should not be counted as a job, a vacancy, a newly created job (or vacancy) and the like. Let us at least start with some statistic which reflects what we are seeking – which, depending on what agenda you are pushing, is an increase or a decrease.
Eye2theLongRun 