Berlin froze its rents in 2020, and in the weeks that followed the number of flats advertised fell by more than half. Catalonia capped its rents the same year, and researchers found no sign that supply shrank. Stockholm has held rents down since the war, and the average wait for a flat there is now nine years. The evidence says rent control works as designed, for the people it was designed for, and sends the bill to everyone who has not arrived yet.
By Raphael Bauer35 min read
The average tenant who got the keys to a rent-controlled flat in Stockholm last year had waited nine years for it. For a flat in the inner city the wait was twenty-one years. Nobody set out to build that. Sweden set out to build a system in …
Carl Menger came to economics through the newspapers, tutored a crown prince, fought the most famous battle over method in the history of economics, and left a body of work you could read in a fortnight. It contains the idea that value is a judgment people make, not a property of things, and an account of how money comes into being that economics had to rediscover a century later.
By Raphael Bauer39 min read
Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the …
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