Nine Years for a Flat

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0200

The average tenant who got the keys to a rent-controlled flat in Stockholm last year had waited nine years for it¹. For a flat in the inner city the wait was twenty-one years². Nobody set out to build that. Sweden set out to build a system in which rents were negotiated collectively and held below what the market would charge: a reasonable aim, and one it achieved. The queue is the price of that success, and it is paid in years by people who are not yet in the room when the policy is decided.

Nothing Inherent in Goods

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:30:00 +0200

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 previous decade in an academic war and the previous year preparing for this question. His evidence, Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1934, “attracted the widest attention” and “even achieved what, for an economist, was perhaps the unique distinction of causing a temporary slump on the stock exchange”¹. On 2 August the empire created the gold crown by law; the new currency came into force nine days later and lasted until the end of 1924².

Economics on The Prosperitist

Nine Years for a Flat

Nothing Inherent in Goods