I'm a liberal and don't fully agree with the argument that rent-control is necessarily and uniformly bad-- although New York's 1940s rent control system sucks-- but I thought it was a well-written and interesting article.
I think economic articles on HN are fine, because economies are systems, and hackers have an innate interest in systems that are not always silicon-based.
The problem is that economics turns into politics, and that attracts a wide range of people who are not hackers, and don't really care about it. And of course, yes, it's a system, but it's a big, hairy complex one that is also impossible to do repeatable experiments with in many situations. Even lots of good economics blogs, by real, serious, respectable economists are full of stuff like "my view is that... " or "I feel that ..." or "I think...".
I'd really like pg to comment on this in a definitive way, though. I'll start posting my own economics articles if it's deemed to be ok, and we'll see what happens.
I think that if it doesn't involve political parties or politicians, it might work.
I mean, it's going to be hard to have a board about startups without talking about market theories, techniques of persuasion, economic trends, role of government in the creation of wealth, distribution of wealth, rational versus irrational buyers, etc. All of these are both economics and politics. We have to be able to talk theory, or the board is just going to be technical fluff, like who's got the best SCM system or what famous author X says about Facebook.
I'm really interested in why things work (or don't).
I'd say if it's directly related to startups, it's probably ok. This article isn't about startups at all. Neither are most other economics articles. Some are, and the ones that are are pretty evident.
Also, "technical fluff"? I enjoy articles like this one:
I think economic articles on HN are fine, because economies are systems, and hackers have an innate interest in systems that are not always silicon-based.