The zombie idea that never dies
As 2026 looms, it brings with it an anniversary worth noticing: eighty years since Milton Friedman and George Stigler published Roofs or Ceilings?, the very first pamphlet of the newly founded Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). The year was 1946. World War II had just ended, America faced rapidly shifting housing markets, and policymakers embraced rent control as a supposedly necessary intervention to protect tenants from rising prices.
Eighty years later, rent control is back.
Across the world—from New York to Berlin, Barcelona, and Mexico City—politicians have resurrected the idea in response to the anxieties of younger generations priced out of their neighborhoods. Campaigns like “Freeze the Rent,” championed in places like New York by figures such as Zohran Mamdani, have made rent control fashionable again in political discourse.
But if the idea has been resurrected, then one of its earliest and most powerful refutations deserves resurrection, too.
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