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 ZT: Learning from China (供以为民主可以包治百病者参考) |
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人之初
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2004/02/14
文章: 4326
经验值: 160
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作者：人之初 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
正如老狼所说, 民主的毛病不光是效率低下, 更重要的是民主制度下更喜欢头痛医头, 脚痛医脚, 很难推行有远见的政策. 事情没有到实在躲不开的时候, 很难下决心去纠正. 希望那些光高唱民主不睁开眼睛的人好好观察一下美国社会,好好想想. 有空到People's Republic of California 去看看民主是如何把事情搞的一团糟的.
Nicholas D. Kristof
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
Tuesday, July 1, 2003 Posted: 6:51 AM EDT (1051 GMT)
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When I lived in China, I periodically wrote scathingly about its Communist housing system and state-controlled rents. But China has had the courage to turn increasingly to a market economy for housing.
Now there's hope that New York will do the same.
At a time when New York City is grappling with a fiscal crisis that is forcing it to close fire stations and cut library hours, you'd think it might consider eliminating rent restrictions. After all, William Tucker, who has written a couple of books on the issue, estimates that rent regulation costs the city at least $2.3 billion a year in lost property tax receipts and extra spending.
Now the New York State Legislature is imposing a plan that will lead over the next eight years to the deregulation of many thousands of apartments as their rents exceed $2,000 a month. That's a step in the right direction, toward capitalism.
Everybody has a favorite rent control story. Most involve widows rattling around five-bedroom Central Park West apartments that they can't afford to leave because they're paying only $500 a month. Mine goes back many years to when I was single: a live-in boyfriend and girlfriend split up acrimoniously, but continued to share a bedroom because neither would give up their wonderful rent-controlled deal. I had designs on the young woman, but it was entirely too awkward to date her with her ex glowering a few feet away.
Supporters of rent regulation have their hearts in the right place, and they make an impassioned plea:
There may be inefficiencies in rent regulations, but what about the inefficiency of lifting them and forcing hundreds of thousands of poor and middle-income families out of the city? Kids will be forced to change schools, adults will be forced to look for new jobs or face long commutes, and the entire character of the city will change. Artists, musicians and starving actors cannot afford the $10,000 a month that an unregulated Manhattan apartment can rent for, so the city will become a dull dormitory for pasty-white investment bankers.
This kind of argument rests on two false assumptions.
First, it's not true that the beneficiaries of rent control are disproportionately poor. The winners are not the poor but those who have rented the same apartment for decades; the biggest losers are those starving actors who move to New York and try to find a place to live, because vacancy rates of under 3 percent are far below the national average of 9.4 percent.
Second, if all rents were freed, they would not rise to the $10,000-a-month level. On the contrary, research suggests that currently unregulated rents would actually drop.
Right now, rents for unregulated apartments are high because they make up only one-third of the market, so they are bid up to artificial levels. If prices were freed, then retirees who spent most of their time in Florida would give up their artificially cheap three-bedroom apartments, and there would be a surge of both vacancies and new construction. Because of regulations, the average rent in New York City is only $706, and that would rise, but the real rents that people actually pay when they find new apartments would fall.
"Detailed research and analysis," says Peter Salins's study for the Manhattan Institute, reveals "the extent to which these interventions harm, rather than protect, New Yorkers."
So New York is roughly in the position of China a decade ago: everyone knows the socialist housing model is lousy, but people worry about the transition to a market economy.
But that concern, while legitimate, may be overblown. I used to live in Cambridge, Mass., which lifted rent controls in 1994 amid dire warnings of hardship. In fact, Cambridge enjoyed a housing boom that improved the quality and availability of housing. Henry Pollakowski, a housing economist at M.I.T. and editor of The Journal of Housing Economics (soon to be a major motion picture), found that freeing rents led to a 20 percent increase in housing investment.
"Such an increase represents a considerable potential boon to the city's residents, and should draw serious consideration from New York City policy makers," he observed.
Yes, it should, and it's reassuring that the state has prodded the city toward decontrol of some rents. I'm glad that New York is showing almost as much commitment to capitalist reforms as China.
作者：人之初 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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