Mark Perry, an economics professor, blogs Carpe Diem with charts and commentary on economics, education costs, housing and free-market arguments.
HN commenters cite his data in debates on rent control, education spending and living standards, usually from a free-market view.
No. Rent control does lead to shortages. I have about $6 million to invest in rental properties. San Francisco is not being considered.
I'm actually liquidating all my California assets, as the INCENTIVE to operate rentals has been destroyed.
Have a read of this:
"Due to Rent Control, S.F. Has 31,000 Vacant Housing Units As Frustrated Landlords Give Up"
The Bay Citizen -- "In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago."
The reason? The city's pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant.
"Increasingly, small-time landlords are just giving up, like one who has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.
“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”
Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters…
Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools.
I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point…
The 99% are more well off today than at any other time in history. You only need to look at the costs of essentials (such as food) as well as luxuries (iPhones, kindles, big screen TVs, etc) to see how much Americans have prospered. See the article below for a quantitative analysis of what low income Americans can buy now.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/08/young-americans-luckiest-generation-in.html
Capitalism matches products and services to consumer demand. Entrepreneurs find the gaps in current offerings or create completely new offerings that create demand. They find and execute on those ideals. Saying they don't create jobs simply isn't true. Saying they destroy jobs is not true as well. They may make industries more efficient thus lowering the costs and increasing the buying power of everyone. The US used to mostly be an agricultural workforce until the advent of farming machinery. Crop yields increased, labor costs decreases, food became drastically cheaper. People in those industries were forced to find jobs in new industries. Now manufacturing has gone overseas and now transitioning to robots following the exact same pattern as farming tech advances. That is the life cycle of capitalism.
As the markets become more and more efficient and technology enables more to get done with less than income will naturally be concentrated in smaller pools.
Final note: I am in favor of progressive tax rate structure and a drastically simpler tax code.
From a systems point of view the changes where dramatic.
"Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land. That is 13 million acres or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 years."
https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increased-6x-since.html
“From 1866, the first year USDA began to publish corn yield estimates, through about 1936, yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the U.S. remained fairly stagnant and averaged about 26 bu/ac (1.6 MT/ha) throughout that 70-year period. Amazingly, the historical data indicate there was no appreciable change in productivity during that entire time period (Fig. 1), even though farmers’ seed-saving practices represented a form of plant breeding.”
https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-for-the-u-s/
PS: Of of note in 1927 there where 2 billion people worldwide and starvation was still common. Growing from 1 billion in 1804 or doubling in 123 years the difference largely came down to an increase in the amount of farmland and a slow increase in productivity.
Harvard professor fired over factually correct claim about IQ variance: https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/07/larry-summers-vindicated-by-new-study.html
Nobel winning co-discoverer of DNA stripped of honors and removed from function over claim that the lower African IQ is genetic in origin: https://nypost.com/2019/01/14/dna-pioneer-james-watson-stripped-of-honors-over-reprehensible-racist-views/
Very liberal professor pressured to resign over claim that whites should not be encouraged to stay home from campus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein
Published paper on IQ variance suppressed: https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/
For every academic that speaks up, many others see what happens to them, and decide to keep quiet.
Hearing all that, one could imagine that in countries like France, with >30% corporate tax and high employment cost, no business can take place at all, and it must have fallen in a deep economic depression a long time ago.
That is generally the case. Unemployment rates in the 8-12 neighborhood are considered a disaster in the US. In France they are normal.
France is as poor as Arkansas and Idaho, two of the poorest US states. If the US in general fell to this level, we'd definitely be calling it a deep depression.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/01/paul-krugman-extols-europes-economic.html
The only reason France isn't described as being in a recession is because it's always been this way, so they are used to it.