JWALES3@UA1VM.BITNET (Jimbo Wales) (02/09/90)
This is the first portion of my posting about rent control. The primary reason I am posting this part today is that I have about 15 minutes available right now, and foresee a shortage of time tomorrow, and so have decided to divide the task over two days. To investigate the issue of what effect rent controls have on housing markets, I utilized the ABI/Inform database. This database contains abstracts of articles in Business and Economics for the past, oh, 4 or 5 years. I searched the data base for the terms "Rent Control". Notice that my search is necessarily handicapped by the search methodology of the ABI/Inform database. My search only reveals those papers which have the words "rent control" placed directly beside each other in the abstract. I did not search for synonyms or anything else. (Hey, I'm doing this for fun, so I can't spend *too* much time on it!). After my computer search was completed, I read all of the abstracts that I found (65 papers) and discarded those which were not addressed to the question at hand. For example, a goodly number of the papers were on the subject of 'valuing real estate' and simply mentioned that rent control laws are an important factor in such deliberations. What I found caught me completely off guard. I assumed that I would find that a fair majority of the articles would vindicate my claim that rent control is a bad policy which fails to achieve its stated objectives. I was stunned to see that an *overwhelming* majority of the articles supported my position. I have abstracts from 33 papers, and tomorrow I will post quotes from these papers, and 'keep score' so to speak. Most of the papers are from academic journals, but a few of them are magazine articles from publications such as Forbes. I will indicate which are which. I think that I can fairly thoroughly show that, historically, rent control laws have been a disastrous failure. --Jimbo p.s. you will either have to trust me that I didn't throw out papers I disagreed with... or: head to the library!