Rent Control: The Ceiling Trap

This article feels like LLM but I can't put my finger on it. It reads like LLM where a human asked an LLM to cover up the LLM-isms. It's odd because the byline of "Drawing on Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok’s Modern Principles of Economics and a century of empirical research." doesn't say who the author is, but the URL root is Alex Tabarrok's profile page.

I feel as though someone (Alex Tabarrok?) said "here's reference material - turn it into an essay".

The footer also feels how an LLM sounds when you tell it to follow specific instructions - they often seem to put too many details about how they did what they did (or how you should feel about it) into their output, kind of how a slimy salesman would explain some fancy shoes and how the cows lived before they were turned into leather: "Set in Newsreader. Layout and graphics after Edward Tufte — data-ink, direct labels, sidenotes. Colors after Sanzo Wada, A Dictionary of Color Combinations (1933). All charts are hand-drawn SVG; all numbers are from the sources above."

Some other clues: "Rent control doesn’t repeal scarcity. It just deletes the signal that manages it." "A rent is not merely a bill. It is a message flashed between strangers." "The gap between those two curves is the shortage." (I find that LLMs often use this format with slightly-misused, yet fancy-sounding words). The X between the Y is the Z. And the best part is, the graph below (which is allegedly "hand-drawn SVG" - hand-drawn by who, I ask) is straight lines, not curves ... that same graph also has the m in market overlapping one of the lines, which is a sloppy mistake an LLM does because it can't see, but a human can and should have seen because it's "hand drawn". How do you hand-draw an SVG that updates with inputs, anyways? "“Chance and favoritism” was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a prediction about who gets housing when prices can’t decide" "every fix works by weakening the control, which is the quiet admission at the heart of the policy" - humans don't write like this. I've never heard of a quiet admission at the heart of anything. Woah, interesting, if you search for "quiet admission at the heart of" on Google, you'll get a bunch of other AI articles. Neat, I found another indicator!

It's really quite an interesting topic and there probably is some real research behind it, but dude ... just put a little header at the top saying you used AI to help you write or do graphs and I'll trust you. Hiding it makes me question everything.