Shadowing-Übung: Does Rent Control ACTUALLY Work? Obama’s Chief Economist Breaks it Down | The Brief - Englisch Sprechen Lernen mit YouTube
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He got the city's rent guidelines board to vote to freeze rent.
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He got the city's rent guidelines board to vote to freeze rent.
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Why is rent control such a bad idea?
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What is the problem with it?
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You get a lot more losers than winners.
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Over time, you can end up paying more rent.
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Young people are really invested in free.
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What does it say about our generation that it seems like socialism is increasingly more popular amongst young people?
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Nothing is free.
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Someone somewhere is paying for it.
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More than eight in ten young adults rate the economy either as bad or terrible.
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What would you tell those young people about the optimism that they should have in the future of the US economy?
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And welcome back to The Brief, PragerU's best new show.
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We have a great conversation for you with Harvard professor Jason Furman.
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But just before we do, make sure you like, follow, subscribe to ensure you do not miss any new episode of the show.
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And with that, we're joined by Harvard professor Jason Furman.
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He served as the 28th chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
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He acted as Obama's chief economist is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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But his real claim to fame is he teaches the largest course at Harvard, the Principles of Economics.
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Professor, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Thanks for having me.
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So let's just start before we get into rent control and Mamdani and all that fun stuff.
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Let's just zoom out for a second.
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In the second quarter of 2026, US consumers obviously faced uneven hiring.
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There's rising inflation, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
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There's ongoing geopolitical tension, certainly in Iran.
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But interestingly, the consumer sentiment data recently released, it rose to 49.5% up from 44.8% in May,
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which was the lowest consumer competence in two years.
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So I would just be curious to hear your sense of the health of the US economy
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and kind of what are those indicators that you're looking at to make that assessment?
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Yeah, so broadly speaking, the first thing I look at is the unemployment rate.
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And right now it's 4.2%, which is close to about as low as it's been over the last 50 or 80 years.
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It's been a little bit lower at times, but not much lower.
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The second thing I look at is how well the economy is growing.
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It's growing at about 2.5% a year, which is pretty good.
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And it's very, very good compared to what other countries around the world are doing if you look at Europe or Japan.
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But then last, there's that item that you had in your list, which is inflation.
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And that's really quite high.
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We thought it was coming down to the Federal Reserve's goal of 2%, but it got stuck at 3% and now it's risen up from there
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in part due to the Iran conflict and other factors.
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And that inflation is weighing really heavily on the minds of Americans.
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So then if that's the zooming out, and let's zoom in for a second as a New Yorker who will actually be moving back to New York, We're seeing that New York City in particular,
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their median rent prices reached an all-time high recently.
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Manhattan's median asking rent hit a staggering $5,300 per month.
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In Brooklyn, it's $4,300.
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So first and foremost, before we get into Mom Donnie and rent control and all that fun stuff, what explains this dramatic price increase?
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I mean, is this just the new normal for consumers?
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There's a lot of people that want to live in New York.
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It's an unbelievable, amazing place.
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And as long as you have a fixed number of apartments, you're going to end up with higher and higher prices for those apartments until the supply equals the demand.
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And so there's really two ways around that.
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One is to make fewer people want to live in New York, make the city crappier, more terrible, make the stock market crash so people are too poor to live there.
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That's one set of options.
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It's not the set of options I would recommend for the sake of completeness.
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Thought I'd mention it.
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The second is to increase supply.
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It's not that there's a fixed number of apartments in New York.
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You can build more.
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And for a while, it's been hard to build both because you need permits to build, but you also need a reason to build.
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You need the expectation that you're going to make a profit from that.
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And so to me, that's the right solution is not to reduce demand, but to increase supply.
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So then let me just piggyback on that last point of increasing supply, because you're right, it's not just a New York phenomenon.
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We're seeing that the median home price has surged to record highs in the United States.
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Now, people will make the argument that while it's true, home prices are higher.
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That's because, you know, what it means to have a home has greatly expanded.
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The fact that you now have AC is something kind of unheard of in the 60s and 70s.
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So would you tell young consumers, particularly my generation, that this is just the new normal, especially when it comes to something like inflation, that it's just here to stick?
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Yeah, look, I'm glad you mentioned that.
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I mean, there's always the sense that, you know, things used to be great.
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Things didn't used to be great.
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Air conditioning was not a standard.
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You know, children sharing rooms used to be the norm.
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Now it is more the norm.
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It's more likely that you're going to have a guest bedroom than that you're going to have your children sharing rooms.
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Of course, a whole variety of ways that people live and arrangements, but I'm talking about the averages and how they've changed over time.
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So in some sense, people, things feel unaffordable.
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In another sense, the things we want today really are in many respects, bigger and better, whether that's housing,
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consumer goods, services, expectations for our workplace.
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Across the board, sort of broadly speaking, things have gotten better.
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So then let's go to Momdani.
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He fulfilled the core campaign promise when he got the city's rent guidelines board to vote, seven to one actually, to freeze rents on approximately one million rent-stabilized departments.
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That applies to both one and two year leases, which is actually the first time that's ever happened.
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This also applies to about 40% of New York City's rental housing stock.
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Now, you famously once said that rent control is basically about as disgraced as any economic policy in the toolkit.
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So if you can just educate myself and educate the viewers, why is rent control such a bad idea?
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Well, first of all, let's go back to the history of it.
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The history is that it started in World War II and there was enormous disruption and dislocation associated with the war,
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big increases in production that were happening in the New York area.
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And so they passed a law and they said, this is going to be temporary as long as the war is going on.
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Then as late as 1961, I've traced this language, it might even be more recent.
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They passed a law that said, given that we're still dealing with the fallout of the emergency conditions associated with World War II,
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we're going to extend red control yet again.
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And so for at least 16 years after the war, maybe for longer, they were pretending that this was a temporary measure due to this one time dislocation.
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Now, this temporary thing has gone on and on and on.
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And now it's been 80 years.
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So what is the problem with it?
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Well, you goes back to what I said before.
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You want more supply.
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If you want more supply, you need to have an incentive to build.
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And if you have rent control, if you're not sure how long it's going to last, you're not sure what it's going to apply to, you're going to end up with less supply.
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Now, some people who are lucky will end up with lower rents if you end up in a rent controlled place.
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But other people won't be able to live in New York City at all
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or will end up in the non-rent controlled stuff, which will go up in price even more because of what happened.
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And so you do get winners and losers, but you get a lot more losers than winners.
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And then the last thing I'd say is some of those winners just aren't the most attractive people for public policy.
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They are maybe an upper middle class family
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and their parents lived in the apartment and they don't want to give it up and they're still living there.
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And I'm sure they're a wonderful family, but I'd rather focus our public policy on people that have the biggest struggles,
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not the lucky upper middle class.
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If I can also just clarify a point that you and many of your colleagues often make, is that rent control in many cases will actually hurt lower income families.
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Can you just talk a little bit about that and clarify how that would how that would work in an economic model? model?
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Sort of a few senses in which it works.
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First of all, there are some people
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that actually aren't super wealthy who are renting a house and in some cases can be swept in by this.
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But the more important thing is if you don't have the connections
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and the access to get yourself into a rent control department, you are at the mercy of a market
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that now is more swamped with people that need it that has fewer apartments because less has been built.
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And so over time, you can end up paying more rent as a result of that.
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So this is not a very well-targeted plan.
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I mean, housing vouchers are something I'm very supportive of.
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You give them to people who need it the most.
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I wish we had enough money to give to everyone.
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Shabbos, I would send you money, that you could live in the most beautiful place in New York City, have the government send it to you.
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But there's sort of a lot of people like you and unfortunately probably can't afford to do that for all of you.
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And let the record show I would gladly accept it, Professor.
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But I think you're touching upon a point that is really interesting that we're seeing with my generation in particular, because leaving aside the economic viability of these programs,
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young people are really invested in free, free universal health care, free college tuition, free apartments.
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I guess I'm just curious, maybe less from an economic perspective and more putting on your political hat for a second, what does it say about our generation
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that it seems like socialism is increasingly more popular amongst young people than capitalism and free market principles?
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Is this something that concerns you?
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Maybe I'm not teaching my class well enough or not enough people are taking it.
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Because at the center of my class is trade-offs and nothing is free.
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It is not free.
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Someone somewhere is paying for it.
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That doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
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Some things are certainly worth paying for.
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Other things are not worth paying for, but that's the question you need to have.
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One issue we have in the United States is no one wants to pay more taxes for anything.
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So in Europe, they have much higher taxes than the United States, including a value-added tax, which is basically a sales tax,
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which is often maybe 15 or 20%.
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And when you have higher taxes, you actually can have more stuff that's not free, but it's sort of free at the margin.
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You're not paying for it as you use it.
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But we want this strange thing where we don't want the taxes, which I totally get and totally respect, but we do want all the stuff that comes with it.
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So where is that stuff going to come from if it's not taxes?
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Well, some people think taxing the rich?
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I think we can tax the rich more than we already do, but we can't tax them nearly enough to pay for the cost of health care or housing or whatever it is,
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child care for everyone.
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So where else could it come from?
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It could come from borrowing.
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Well, borrowing isn't free.
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It drives up interest rates.
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It makes mortgages and housing more expensive.
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It passes a burden on to people in the future.
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It could come at the expense of inflation.
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You try to spend a lot of money you don't have
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and you end up driving prices up rather than making anyone rich or no one will like that either.
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So yeah, if you present people with part of the question, do you want free stuff, everything else equal?
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My answer is also yes.
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The problem is it's not everything else equal.
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Everything else always changes when you give people stuff.
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And that's painful and difficult set of choices come out of that.
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But the alternative of ignoring that is even worse.
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If I could just ask a clarifying question based on that last point of the wealthy paying their fair share.
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Obviously, certainly within liberal policies and ideologies, the argument is they are very much not paying their fair share.
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In New York City alone, about half of all the revenue is coming from the top 1% of earners.
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So I guess I would just love for you to flesh that idea out.
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Are the wealthy paying their fair share in taxes?
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And if not, what is that magic number?
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There's two pieces to this question.
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One is some people act as
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if the wealthy people have done a bad thing by virtue of getting wealthy and should be punished or discouraged.
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That very emphatically is not my view.
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And I think the evidence for that is really lacking.
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So Jeff Bezos has made the world a much better place.
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People can get lower prices, wider variety, get it faster and more conveniently,
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etc. So to me, higher taxes on Jeff Bezos is not a moral referendum on whether you like him or not.
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I don't know the man, but he's done all sorts of good for me personally, just by virtue of being an Amazon shopper.
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I don't have some special stake in this company that I need to disclose.
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Although I do shop enough there that maybe I should disclose that.
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Anyway, so that's sort of door one.
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And that's where some of the debate is.
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And certainly you hear some more in the Democratic Party
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and the Republican Party that these are sort of unjust money and we should take it back.
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Yeah.
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There's then a second view, which is Jeff Bezos has a lot of money,
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but he won't miss it if we tax some of it away and other people could really use that.
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That's a utilitarian perspective that tends to be mine.
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It is correct, Chabas, I completely agree that high income people disproportionately pay a disproportionate share of the taxes.
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We actually do have a genuinely very progressive tax system, but I personally would be happier if it was a little bit more progressive because I don't think people would miss it.
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There's a third philosophical perspective, which I fully respect.
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It's not completely mine, which is that you worked hard or you were lucky or you were skilled, whatever it is, and it's your money.
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It's not like when you win the lottery, we tax you 95% because you didn't need that money and you want to share it with everyone else.
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You get taxed, but you don't get some special lottery tax and there shouldn't be some special Jeff Bezos tax either.
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And that tends to be the philosophical approach that many in the Republican Party have.
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And a little bit of me sympathizes with it, but it's not my main perspective on this question.
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Right.
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And what we're seeing, at least within the Democratic Party, is something that I'll be quite honest, I don't really see the correlation, which is you can't have a trillionaire,
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you can't have billionaires while there's child poverty or while there's economic inefficiencies.
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I just don't see the relation between those two things, but I digress.
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I do want to ask one last question on the sentiments of young people before we move on.
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Young people arguably face the worst, the worst entry-level job market since the start of the pandemic.
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They have significant economic instability, but really what I'm most concerned about is that more than eight in 10,
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eight in 10 young adults rate the economy either as bad or terrible.
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That's according to a recent survey by Generation Lab.
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They asked 1,018 to 34-year-olds.
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So my question to you is, what would you tell those young people about not just the health of the economy, but perhaps the optimism that they should have in the future of the U.S economy, if any?
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You know, I had good answers to all your questions.
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I'm a little bit less sure about this one because I do watch what's going on with AI and get worried.
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I don't think it's having a huge effect yet.
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A lot of the companies that cite AI are making an excuse for something they wanted to do.
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You still see actually robust hiring in sectors like coding, that is almost the easiest job to replace with AI.
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But I am getting a little bit nervous about the set of changes that are coming down the pike.
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Now, most of these changes I think will ultimately make us richer and better off.
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They'll open up all sorts of new and exciting opportunities for us as a society and an economy, but there could be some bumps along the way.
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The second thing I'd say is even if it's the worst market for hiring, I mean, there've been much worse ones like the financial crisis, which I worked my way.
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I was at the White House working on that at the time, the 1970s, et cetera, the early 1980s.
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There've been a lot of worse times for hiring, and I feel like people dealt with it maybe psychologically a little bit better than they dealt with it now.
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And then the last thing I'd say is people just have do have a lot of personal control
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and initiative and choices and work.
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And it's not perfectly rewarded in America.
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There's all sorts of luck that gets involved.
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There's all sorts of unfairness that gets involved.
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But there's a decent relationship between skill and hard work and getting a job,
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being successful in it and having a decently comfortable life.
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So let me just ask one one last question.
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to bring us out because you've not only been vocal against rent control, but also tariffs.
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Tariff rates are the highest they have been since the 30s.
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They surge from basically an average of like 3% to as high as 20%.
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I mean, we have some rates on Chinese goods that are more than 100%.
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So that to me is kind of comical.
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Now, you've made the argument very clearly that Trump's tariffs are more or less solving a problem that doesn't exist.
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If you wouldn't mind just educating myself again, just educating viewers.
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Why in your eyes are these tariffs a bad idea?
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And why would you say that trade deficits are not inherently something to be fearful of?
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One of the core ideas that economists are almost universally attached to is comparative advantage.
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And it's the idea that no one can make everything.
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I don't make my own clothing.
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I don't grow my own food.
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I buy that from other people that are better at doing it than me.
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And I make what I do, which is educational services, and a set of associated things.
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It's the same thing with countries.
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Countries can't make absolutely everything.
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And so you are going to be better off both as consumers
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and also as workers in better jobs if you do the things you're good at and buy the other stuff.
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And tariffs basically get in the way of that.
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They're not catastrophic.
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I think our growth is a little bit lower because of them, but not massively lower.
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Prices are definitely higher, maybe half a point to a percentage point higher because of the tariffs.
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And that to me is an unnecessary, unforced error.
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And ultimately, you don't create more jobs because of tariffs.
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You just change the jobs and you probably change them to things that we're
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less good at and thus paid not as well for doing.
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Let me ask you one last question.
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There's one piece of inflation we haven't spoken about, And that's great inflation.
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We got to know each other at Harvard, of course.
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And 60%, I didn't know this, 6-0 of all grades given to undergraduates at Harvard University this year were A's.
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I know this is a topic you're also passionate about.
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Why is this happening?
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And what do you do about it?
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Yeah, and first of all, let's just be clear.
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That's straight A.
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If you add an A-, it's even more than that.
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Oh, my God.
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The very best grade that was given.
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The faculty here just voted to cap the number of A's at 20% of students, plus four for each class, which helps some of the smaller classes.
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It was a vote, I think it was 70 to 30 in favor of it.
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And to me, that was encouraging in two respects.
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One is it's tackling an embarrassing, embarrassing problem.
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But two, it shows that there is a silent majority of the faculty at Harvard
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that are sane and rational and want to do the right thing.
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They're not always the voices you hear.
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They're not always the people that show up to every single meeting, but latent, they're there and need ways to express themselves.
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And this was one of those ways.
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Well, Professor, needless to say, I count you as one of those lone moral voices of sanity, certainly at Harvard.
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Professor Jason Furman served as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, President Obama's chief economist.
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He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
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Really appreciate you making the time, Professor.
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Thank you.
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Well, thank you so much for watching.
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Make sure to like and subscribe if you have any questions, comments, or if you want to see a particular topic addressed, make sure to put it down in the comments
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and feel free to keep the conversation going through all of your questions or yellings or rants.
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Find me on social media.
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Just type in Shabbos Kestenbaum.
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You're not going to find many other Shabbos Kestenbaums.
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And I'm looking forward to speaking with you all very soon.
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