My Debate on Price Controls

Yesterday, I participated in a debate at the Center for American Progress on the viability of price controls as a policy tool. If you’re interested in watching the hour-long debate, the video is available here:

It was a thoughtful conversation. The price control opponents — Ben Harris from the Brookings Institute and Tara Sinclair from George Washington University — raised a number of good points, particularly in making the case for what they believed were better, short-term alternatives to price controls. You can see how I (and my fellow debater Neale Mahoney) responded.

I won’t color your view of the debate by explaining why I think our side won. You can judge that for yourself. But Neale and I have “won” in at least one sense. A big part of our goal in writing the original New York Times op-ed on price controls last November was to push policymakers and economists to think about the tradeoffs of price controls (including their benefits) rather than dismissing them categorically as a policy option. The fact that a mainstream think tank like the Center for American Progress hosted this debate — and then followed it with a lengthy private discussion about the potential use of price caps and other controls in sectors like healthcare and energy — is a hopeful sign. It also reflects well on Isabella Weber, a professor at UMass-Amherst, who has been making the academic case for price controls for years now, in the face of deep skepticism from her fellow economists. I recommend reading her work if you want a deeper dive into the history and effectiveness of price controls both in the US and abroad.