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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

Remember that Freakonomics is first and foremost entertainment. They know what their audience wants to hear and create the narrative that's most entertaining and fits the story arc they know listeners expect.

It's the podcast version of Penn & Teller's Bullshit.

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Oh, it’s not as one sided a piece as I and the title make it out to be. They do talk to several competent proponents of rent control. But I think the case against it pretty clear and compelling: it’s good for the people on the inside, and really bad for everyone else.

Edit: The opinions of Dubner et al are not anywhere near as clear as Penn and Teller. I’ve been listening for years and I don’t think I could tell you which way he votes usually.

Seems to be pretty much disinformation though. There is a section about Sweden at the end, but it is ignoring everything that has happened in the last 20 years. Of course rent control 'doesn't work' when you are converting government owned apartments to co-ops at below market rate, subsidizing co-ops and issuing 100 year mortgages. Rent control has to be combined with active building policies if you want more housing, in which case it actually keeps down the value of land. That is the big problem in most cities today, builders simply can't get land at a price to build affordable housing.

Why would you need rent control if you had active building policies that ensured supply kept up with demand? The price of housing wouldn’t change, so there would be no need to mandate a specific below market price.

You still want to even out the swings. Supply won't necessarily keep up in any given time or area.

You aren't necessarily going to be able to supply enough housing in the most popular spot were construction is hard and land expensive. Instead you want create equivalent areas fast enough. But without rent control all the affluent people quickly ends up in the same space, which is hard to make an equivalent of with affordable housing.

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