The economists are fighting: Our scoop last week about Lina Khan’s plans to make New York City cheaper — starting with the price of concessions at sports stadiums — set off a heated X economic debate about every everyman’s favorite topics, externalities and elasticity. Matt Yglesias and Harvard’s Jason Furman argued that lower beer prices will mean higher ticket prices, which Biden antitrust architect Tim Wu thinks is dumb, or at least an empirical question worth answering. Everyman-fluent billionaire Mark Cuban threw in with the popularists: “They call fans the 6th man for a reason.”
“You need to listen to economists, but you don’t need to defer to them in all things,” Wu said in an interview from his book tour in the UK. “The government subsidizes the subway to the stadium — is that making baseball tickets more expensive?”
Khan’s role in Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s affordability efforts is part of a new romance with price controls. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race this month after promising to freeze electricity prices.