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Comment by pixelatedindex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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. The econlib survey showed it, the wikipedia links support that, and you apparently agree. So... thanks?

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.

> 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.

If you as an armchair expert disagree with a broad consensus of actual experts - i.e. 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 first understanding how they are wrong, then that should be a strong indicator that your thinking is clouded by bias.

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