Globalization

Business Insider: The Secret To Getting A Great Meal Is Placing The Right Order

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This article originally appeared in Business Insider

When an economist goes out for lunch, he doesn’t think twice about putting the waiter on the spot. He asks what the server likes to eat, then flaunts some knowledge of the cuisine.

The idea, says economist Tyler Cowen, is “to ask in a way that [the waiter] will believe that you’re serious and informed and won’t steer you down the wrong the path.” It’s his tried-and-true method for avoiding dull meals.

“Half the dishes there will be so-so or average,” says Cowen, so ask the waiter point-blank, “What are your specialized regional dishes? You want to get the waiter out of the mode of viewing you as a mainstream consumer in white bread America.”

Cowen prides himself on eating dangerously and encourages consumers to visit ethnic hole-in-the-walls, where they’re almost guaranteed to order something surprising. You won’t get flavorful bi bim bap at corporate chains like California Pizza Kitchen, so he makes it a point to suss out his neighborhood’s ethnic haunts. “Typically, they’re in clusters,” he says, “The competition forces them to be good.”

Avoiding tourist haunts and staying closer to the suburbs are two other ways to find great joints. Think: Indian cuisine in Astoria, Queens versus “Indian Row” in New York City’s touristy East Village. “You can tell an ethnic place is good when it’s hard to get to and local people are eating it,” he says.

The author of ”An Economist Gets Lunch” first made a name for himself with his blog, Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, where for the past two decades he’s written on all things food and reviewed the best gems in Northern Virginia from Ricos Tacos Moya II to Bangkok Golden Thai.

Yet Cowen admits he wasn’t always a foodie. Growing up in Northern New Jersey, his parents mainly ate pizza and hamburgers, so it wasn’t until he moved to Europe that the economist finally broke from tradition.

“How you approach food is related to how you approach life,” he says. “It’s the notion of being curious. The blend of the quest, taste, surprise and interaction is that when they all come together, it’s just magical. It often happens when you travel but it can happen at home.”

The New York Times: World Hunger, The Problem Left Behind

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture.

The green revolution has slowed since the early 1990s, and it has become harder to bolster crop yields, as I have discussed in my book, “An Economist Gets Lunch.” And recent research by Dani Rodrik, a professorof international political economy at Harvard, indicates that agricultural productivity improvements are among the hardest to transmit from one nation to another.

For all its importance to human well-being, agriculture seems to be one of the lagging economic sectors of the last two decades. That means the problem of hunger is flaring up again, as the World Bank and several United Nations agencies have recently warned.

Consider Africa, which is often considered to have turned a corner and to be headed toward steady growth. The expansion of the African middle class and the decline in child mortality rates are both quite real, but the advances have not been balanced — and agriculture lags behind.

In a recent address, Michael Lipton, an economist and research professor at Sussex University in Britain, offered a sobering look at Africa’s agricultural productivity. He suggests that Rwanda and Ghana are gaining, but that most of the continent is not. Production and calorie intake per capita don’t seem to be higher today than they were in the early 1960s. It remains an issue how Africa’s growing population will be fed.

One huge problem is that the price of fertilizer in Africa is often two to four times the world price. Yet African soil and rainfall make much of the continent subpar for growing food. In other words, the region that probably needs fertilizer the most also has to pay the most for it, and much of Africa doesn’t have the prosperity to make this an easy stretch. The high prices result in large part from infrastructure and trade networks that aren’t developed enough to create a low-cost and competitive market. And the problem could worsen if economic troubles in China distract it from its beneficial investments in African roads and harbors.

On top of all that, many African nations have unhelpful policies toward agriculture. Malawi, for instance, subjects corn to periodic export and import restrictions as well as to price controls, all of which thwart development of a well-functioning market. When market speculators save corn in anticipation of greater scarcity, they may be punished by law. These restrictions of market incentives exacerbate the basic supply problems.

Such bottlenecks are a challenge for the future of the African economies. For comparison, the rapid expansions of economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were all preceded by significant progress in agricultural productivity. In these countries, higher yields created a domestic surplus for savings and investment, encouraged small-scale entrepreneurship, fostered a sense of economic security and helped the middle class expand.

In contrast, much of Africa’s growth has come from resource wealth — such as oil, diamonds, gold and strategic minerals — and, unfortunately, resource prices are notoriously volatile. Resource wealth is less well-suited to supporting sustainable democracies, because it tends to be connected with state-backed privileges and other legally entrenched entities. The Norwegian government manages its oil wealth just fine, for example, but autocracies and fledgling democracies are more likely to be corrupted.

There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent studyin the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.

WHAT to do? First, put food problems higher on the agenda. In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture. Even in the economics profession, the field of agricultural economics is often viewed as secondary in status.

Second, the United States government should stop subsidizing its own corn-based biofuels, mainly ethanol. Today, about 40 percent of America’s field corn goes into biofuels, thanks to a subsidy and regulatory policy dating from 2005. With virtual unanimity, experts condemn these subsidies as driving up food prices, damaging land use and costing the taxpayers money. Once the energy costs of producing the biofuels are taken into account, it doesn’t even appear that this policy helps slow climate change. It has become a form of crony capitalism, at great global expense.

Today, we have two presidential candidates who both look a bit short on grand vision and transformational change. Perhaps they could look to helping solve the food problem — and making a big dent in global hunger — as America’s next beneficial legacy.

The world is not yet in that happy situation where “what’s for dinner?” is a boring question.

The Globe and Mail: The World According to Tyler Cowen

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This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail

He’s not as famous as Nouriel Roubini and has far fewer Twitter followers (roughly 23,000 versus 194,000 for Dr. Doom). And he hasn’t, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, won a Nobel prize. Yet 50-year-old Tyler Cowen is a formidable presence on the American economic landscape. Chairman of Economics at George Mason University in Virginia, he is a prolific writer and editor and blogger; his Marginal Revolution – co-written with his Canadian colleague Alex Tabarrok – is among the best read blogs in the field. His last book,The Great Stagnation, was a bestseller. His next, he told Globe and Mail reporter Michael Posner in an interview, will explore what the path out of the great stagnation will look like. Mr. Cowen will deliver a lecture Tuesday evening at Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre.

COWEN:When I wrote The Great Stagnation, I thought it would take 20 years for us to get out of it. Now, I think it will be 10 years. I don’t think the great run of innovation is over. I just think it’s on pause. The Western world has excellent institutions. Science is still vital. But part of our problem is behavioural – getting people to be motivated. Throwing more science at things isn’t always the answer. Insofar as I’m pessimistic, it’s behavioural issues, especially in education and health care.

 

How volatile will markets be?

We’ll see levels of market volatility and stock price collapses that will be, to many people, horrifying. So the headlines a year from now – I’m very pessimistic. But if you’re asking about the real economy several years down the road, I do not think we are headed for doom.

 

What sectors will lead the next great boom?

Artificial intelligence [AI] will be a significant breakthrough. There are new developments almost every day. Cheaper fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, will spur short-run growth. And an increasing share of national income will go to capital and high productivity. It may not feel like an end to stagnation for many workers, but in terms of aggregate output, the U.S., Canada and Mexico are poised to do extremely well. Mexico will find its way around the drug problems and become more integrated into the U.S. economy. It’s the great underrated nation in the world right now.

 

Can advances in AI create great numbers of jobs?

No. A lot of people will be hurt by it. Owners of intellectual property, and capital and manufacturing plants will do very well. Output will go up a lot. But in many areas, wages will fall and jobs will disappear. So the U.S. trend – falling labour force participating rates – will continue. But people who get quality education will be better off.

 

Many economists see China as the great growth saviour. You don’t.

You can’t grow at 10 per cent per year forever. It’s already been 30 years – the greatest growth streak in history. But China is slowing down very rapidly. It’s been investing about 50 per cent of GDP [gross domestic product] for a long time. It’s very hard to do that well. And they are massively corrupt. I tend to think they will never be as wealthy per capita as Mexico. I would call that a medium-hard landing. It’s here now. The slowdown will be very bad for parts of Africa and it will hurt Canada. But Canada has other strengths and will be fine. It will hurt Brazil and other resource-rich economies. I don’t think it will hurt the U.S. I don’t adhere to apocalyptic scenarios – no riots or rebellion. I just think they will grow much more slowly. The same thing is happening in India.

 

What’s your call on the future of the euro zone?

I think multiple countries will leave, but I’m not sure that’s the pessimistic forecast. The pessimistic forecast might be they stay in forever and all get dragged down by deflation. I’m a pessimist about the euro, but not about Europe. So the southern periphery, Spain, Italy, Greece, leave – Italy might be the first to go – and the rest stay. That will work just fine. But unless they want to give up democracy, I don’t see greater fiscal union as the answer. The economies will eventually recover. There is great human capital, a lot of strengths, and mostly good institutions. Austerity is not the main problem – it’s that their banking systems are coming apart at the seams.

 

Do you play the stock market?

I’ve been heavily in cash for some time, and paying down debt. I thought stocks were overvalued in the early part of the last decade. I was right too early, but I did not suffer in the financial crisis.

 

What’s the likelihood of a major war?

I’m worried about it, especially in the Middle East. I don’t think it would be good for the U.S. economy. Energy prices would go up. There’d be a lot of uncertainty, which the world does not need more of. And the issue of nuclear weapons is not trivial. It’s hard to get a good understanding vis-à-visIran. There’s a lot of misinformation. But we seem to be on a collision course.

 

Does it matter who wins the U.S. presidency?

It’s hard to tell. As people, [Republican leader Mitt] Romney and [U.S. President Barack] Obama are not that different. Both are in bad situations, for reasons not of their own making. If Obama wins, which seems more likely, we probably get more of the same – gridlock, nastiness. If Romney wins, we have to ask, ‘Do Republicans really mean what they’ve been saying?’ I think they don’t. It’ll be like the Bush years – right-wing versions of left-wing ideas.

 

Does Obama get enough credit for saving the global economy from collapse?

George Bush doesn’t get enough credit. He basically said, ‘This is over my head, but I’m going to back [then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson and [U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben] Bernanke to the hilt,’ and he did. I give most of the credit to Bernanke. He was an absolute genius.

 

What about Russia?

I see a big brain drain, too heavy a reliance on resource prices and their politics is far from settled. And they are not reinvesting in education. So I’d say I’m a pessimist.

 

What credence do you attach to the Black Swan scenario – the possibility of a completely unanticipated event having a major impact?

It’s an interesting theory, but it’s miscategorized. These so-called unpredictable events are actually the classic events of history – war, financial panic, maybe pandemic in the future. They’re unpredictable because we make mistakes. The problem is us. They’re not actually black swans – not bolts out of the blue.

 

To what extent was America’s sense of exceptionalism damaged by 9/11, the Iraq war, and the 2008 financial debacle?

We have a much stupider version of exceptionalism now. It’s less fact-based. The better version has to do with our ability to reinvent ourselves, be self-critical and, if we screw up, come back to better ways of doing things. The stupider version is jingoistic and patriotic, and gets you into mistaken wars. So our exceptionalism has been traded in for a weaker version and it’s distressing.

 

Canadian exceptionalism often focuses on the virtues of our health-care and banking systems. Justified?

Canada has done extremely well in controlling health care costs. The question is how much is that because the system is better, and how much because health care doesn’t matter – Canadians are just healthier behaviourally. As for the banks, I’d say that when you have two countries next to each other, you’re best off if they’re run on different principles, say with respect to of risk aversion, as Canada and the U.S are. The banking systems are thus complementary. On our side, it’s not clear we’ve done anything to corral the banks. It’s not clear we will. I think we’re in denial. This is very worrying. As in the auto industry, where there is still excess capacity, the underlying problems have not gone away.

The New York Times: Two Prisms for Looking at China’s Problems

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

CHINA is confronting some serious economic problems, and how Beijing does — or doesn’t — respond to them could bend the course of the global economy.

First, China’s real estate bubble is deflating. But its economy also seems to be suffering from what we economists call excess capacity — an overinvestment in capital goods, whether in factories, retail stores or infrastructure.

So what now? The answer depends in part on your school of economic thinking.

Keynesian economics holds that aggregate demand — the sum of all consumption, investment,  government spending and  net exports — drives stability, and that government can and should help in difficult times. But the Austrian perspective, developed by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, and championed today by many libertarians and conservatives, emphasizes how government policy often makes things worse, not better.

Economists of all stripes agree that China may be in for a spill. John Maynard Keynesemphasized back in the 1930s the dangers of speculative bubbles, and China certainly seems to have had one in its property market.

Keynesians would argue that Beijing has the tools to stoke aggregate demand. It could, for example, adjust interest rates and bank reserve requirements, instruct state-owned banks to maintain lending, or deploy some of its $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves. The government also appears to have many shovel-ready construction and infrastructure projects that could help the economy glide to a soft landing and then bounce back.

The Austrian perspective introduces some scarier considerations. China has been investing 40 percent to 50 percent of its national income. But it is hard to invest so much money wisely, particularly in an environment of economic favoritism. And this rate of investment is artificially high to begin with.

Beijing is often accused of manipulating the value of its currency, the renminbi, to subsidize its manufacturing. The government also funnels domestic savings into the national banking system and grants subsidies to politically favored businesses, and it seems obsessed with building infrastructure. All of this tips the economy in very particular directions.

The Austrian approach raises the possibility that there is no way for China to make good on enough of its oversubsidized investments. At first, they create lots of jobs and revenue, but as the business cycle proceeds, new marginal investments become less valuable and more prone to allocation by corruption. The giddy booms of earlier times wear off, and suddenly not every decision seems wise. The combination can lead to an economic crackup — not because aggregate demand is too low, but because the economy has been producing the wrong mix of goods and services.

TO keep its investments in business, the Chinese government will almost certainly continue to use political means, like propping up ailing companies with credit from state-owned banks. But whether or not those companies survive, the investments themselves have been wasteful, and that will eventually damage the economy. In the Austrian perspective, the government has less ability to set things right than in Keynesian theories.

Furthermore, it is becoming harder to stimulate the Chinese economy effectively. The flow of funds out of China has accelerated recently, and the trend may continue as the government liberalizes capital markets and as Chinese businesses become more international and learn how to game the system. Again, reflecting a core theme of Austrian economics, market forces are overturning or refusing to validate the state-preferred pattern of investments.

For Western economies, the Keynesian view is much more popular than the Austrian view among mainstream economists. The Austrian view has a hard time explaining how so many investors can be fooled into so much malinvestment, especially given the traditional Austrian perspective that markets are fairly effective in allocating resources. But China has had such an extreme and pronounced artificial subsidization of investment that the Austrian perspective may apply there to a greater degree.

The optimistic view is that Chinese excess capacity and overbuilding are manageable — that the current overextensions of investment will be propped up, but they won’t have to be propped up for long. In this view, the Chinese economy will fairly soon grow rather naturally into supporting its current capital structure, and its downturns will be mere hiccups, not busts.

The pessimistic view is that the problems are so large that the government’s attempts to prop up its investments with further subsidies could so limit consumption, and so distort resource allocation, that the Chinese economy will stagnate. In this view, the political means for allocating investment would grow to dominate market forces, the proposed “economic rebalancing” of the Chinese economy toward domestic consumption would become a distant memory, and China would have an even tougher time opening its capital markets and liberalizing its economy. Given that China already faces competition from nations where wages are lower, and that its population is aging, the country might not return to its previous growth track.

THE jury is out. But to my eye, we may well find a significant and lasting disruption, closer to what the Austrian theory would predict. Consider a broader historical perspective: How often in world history have countries enjoyed 30-plus years of extremely rapid growth without a major economic tumble somewhere along the way? One can be optimistic about China for the long term and still be fearful for the next turn in its business cycle.

In any case, China has surprised the world many times before — and is likely to surprise it again.

BusinessWorld: Philippines Could Be ‘Next Rising Star’

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This article originally appeared in The Washington Post


THE PHILIPPINES could be the “world’s next rising star” because it is relatively insulated from the turbulent global environment, economists said on Friday, but the country’s ascent will depend on finding solutions to key constraints.

When you look for countries that could be the world’s next rising star, you look for increasing growth, a stable fiscal deficit, strong English skills and a belief in education,” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, at the inaugural conference of the Angara Centre for Law and Economics.

“The Philippines has all of those things. It has the best chance,” he added.

Exposure to Europe’s ongoing debt woes and the slowdown in China is limited, Mr. Cowen explained as he lumped the Philippines along with Indonesia, Ghana and Nigeria as among the countries expected to be resilient amid the global downturn.

Mr. Cowen stressed, though, that this was not an “absolute prediction,” with much depending on how the government makes the most its opportunities.

“The discussions must begin with structural transformation,” added John Nye, a fellow economist at George Mason University.

One of the main issues that needs to be resolved is how to move people from poor agriculture jobs to better-paying ones in industry, Mr. Nye said, adding that more often than not, this also involves physically moving people to the urban centers.

“However, there are so many laws that make this difficult — laws on zoning, taxation, competition, labor, trade. This network of policies adds up,” Mr. he said. No single law — not even the often-blamed foreign ownership limits in the 1987 Philippine Constitution — is to blame, he added.

Changes must be made to these “redundant,” “misguided” and “contradictory” laws so that more businesses and investments can come into the Philippines and generate much-needed employment.

“The fact that we have so many overseas Filipino workers only means that we have a lot of highly-skilled people willing to work. Why are they so employable abroad but not here? Clearly, there are obstacles to creating employment,” Mr. Nye said.

CONTINUE READING

Business Insider: Tom Keene: Keep An Eye On The Twitter Vigilantes

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This article originally appeared in Business Insider

Business Insider caught up with Bloomberg’s Tom Keene yesterday at Bloomberg’s Summer Picnic at Randall’s Island. (Bloomberg really knows how to party)

Sporting seersucker and a summer beverage, Keene reflected on the euro crisis and the lightning-fast, pithy analysis offered by the twitter vigilantes: the bloggers, the reporters, and the academics who tweet out the first reaction to news seconds after major news breaks.

Keene recently blogged about Twitter’s response to last weekend’s Spanish bank bailout announcement.

“It was stunning, just stunning Saturday, to watch digital media in full force,” he wrote. “The Internet-first crew pummeled Main Stream Media with immediate paragraphs of perspective, then delivered substantial and smart articles as MSM issued tentative first reporting.”

Keene praised some of the most popular Twitter account: Bloomberg’s Linda Yueh (@LindaYueh), ZeroHedge (@zerohedge), Professor Tyler Cowen (@TylerCowen). FT’s Peter Spiegel (@SpiegelPeter), and of course Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart).

As the results of the Greek elections roll out, keep an eye on Twitter to offer the first response once again.

The New York Times: A Power Vacuum Is Killing the Euro Zone

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

As problems mount in the euro zone, it’s increasingly evident that we’ve been witnessing an institutional failure of monumental proportions.

What is to be done about Greece? Simply keeping it in the euro zone won’t help much, even if it’s possible.  The continuing crisis has sapped confidence in banks not only in Greece, but also in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland, though to varying degrees.  Unless there are explicit guarantees to these banks soon, the market will likely take a further turn for the worse.

An absence of guarantees could prompt a broader chain reaction of capital flight and bank collapses across several countries.

The basic problem is that many people won’t keep their euros in a Greek bank, and perhaps not in a Spanish bank, either, when those euros can be moved to Germany or some other haven.

Yet German citizens do not appear ready to guarantee Spanish banks or, by extension, the whole credit system of Spain and the other periphery nations. Guarantees of that scope are probably impossible and may also require constitutional changes in some nations.

We thus face the danger that the euro, the world’s No. 2 reserve currency, could implode.  Such an event wouldn’t be just another depreciation or collapse of a currency peg; instead, it would mean that one of the world’s major economic units doesn’t work as currently constituted.

We are realizing just how much international economic order depends on the role of a dominant country — sometimes known as a hegemon — that sets clear rules and accepts some responsibility for the consequences.  For historical reasons, Germany isn’t up to playing the role formerly held by Britain and, to some extent, still held today by the United States.  (But when it comes to the euro zone, the United States is on the sidelines.)

There appears to be a power vacuum, and the implications are alarming. We may be entering a new world where international cooperative arrangements, in environmental areas as well as finance, are commonly recognized as impossible.  If the core European nations cannot coordinate effectively, what can we expect in dealings with China, Russia and other countries that have less of a common background and understanding?

In the euro zone, we are seeing two refusals to cooperate: Germany won’t renew financial pledges to Greece without Greek compliance on previous agreements, and Greece doesn’t want Germany to control its national budget.  Both seem reasonable positions, and maybe they are, but reasonable positions can apparently destroy an international agreement rather easily.

Is there a way out?  To seek a binge of pro-growth government spending, in the hope of stimulating economies, is to assume what already stands in doubt. The crisis has reached a head partly because the market already lacks trust in the periphery governments to invest money for sustainable economic growth.

There is also talk of forming a true fiscal union, but that seems to be doubling down on a bad idea.  If the euro zone cannot summon enough cooperation now, how is any union requiring tighter cooperation supposed to work?  How would national budgets be set and approved?  A credit collapse remains a real possibility.

Is it too late for monetary policy to make a difference?  The other euro-zone nations might allow Greece to leave, while guaranteeing payments for food and fuel, both of which Greece imports, for a reasonable period.  Higher price inflation might then depreciate the euro, limit the need for difficult downward wage adjustments, and help Spain and Italy improve their competitiveness.  The inflation could come through central bank bond purchases from the troubled nations, thus easing their debt problems.  That may be the only useful option still on the table.

But that’s also not easy.  First, economically healthier nations may be reluctant to accept the inflation, which would represent a rather direct, continuing redistribution of wealth to the troubled debtor countries.

The second problem is that some of the banking systems in the periphery nations may be too broken for monetary policy to take hold.  Imagine the European Central Bank trying to infuse new money and credit into Spain, while bank deposits move quickly to Germany, Switzerland and other safer places.  Again, why would anyone want to keep money in the bank of a fiscally troubled nation?  That loss of confidence will not be easily repaired.

Since December, the European Central Bank has lent more than a trillion euros to euro-zone banks, but that has bought no more than a few months of peace.  It isn’t clear how much more can be done.  It probably is about time to judge the euro zone as a failed idea — and rarely is it wise to double down on failed ideas.

What is most disturbing is that the euro-zone nations are democratic, protective of basic liberties, and have advanced intellectual and research communities. The final lesson of this debacle is that smart nations with noble motives can make very big mistakes.  And that should concern us all.

Time Moneyland: Cheap Eats: Surprising Advice on Dining Out — From An Economist

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in Time Moneyland on May 1, 2012.

Tyler Cowen is an economist who teaches at George Mason University. He has written economics columns for the New York Times, published what the Economist called “the most talked-about economics book of the year” in 2011, and was praised recently by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” The man is obviously quite knowledgeable—when it comes to economics. So what’s he doing giving recommendations for what to eat in the local strip mall?

Food, Cowen would argue, is, in fact, always a matter of economics. We all need food. We make food decisions every day, and every one of these decisions has a monetary connotation, so there’s an economic angle to everything and everywhere we eat.

Cowen’s new book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, is filled with advice on food, and if there’s one overarching theme, it’s that “foodie” should not equate to “snobby.”

Part of the book is excerpted in the May issue of Atlantic Monthly, in a story called “Six Rules for Dining Out.” One of the most curious rules is that when it comes to getting the best value for the dining dollar, foodies should pass on nearly every restaurant located in hip urban neighborhoods. Instead, Cowen recommends heading to restaurants that share parking lots with dollar stores, supermarkets, and liquor stores. What we’re talking about is the scintillating dining destination known as the suburban strip mall.

Cue: record scratch sound.

Cowen’s reasoning is that, compared to restaurants in high-rent districts, strip mall eateries have low overhead, so they can keep menu prices down and experiment with foods and ingredients without constantly having to worry it won’t be able to pay the bills:

A strip-mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in, say, a large shopping mall. The people with the best, most creative, most innovative cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money. Many of them end up in dumpier locales, where they gradually improve real-estate values.

Hip, high-rent urban neighborhoods tend to attract well-established, upscale restaurants, because only these restaurants can afford the rent. The suburbs and peripheries of cities are where immigrants tend to live—and, not so coincidentally, also where they work and eat. Cowen looks especially for areas where a particular ethnic cuisine dominates the scene. When an area is loaded with a huge selection of, say, Indian or Korean restaurants, the odds are pretty good that any individual restaurant’s food is above average, if not excellent. After all, there is plenty of local competition, and their immigrant clientele is informed and unlikely to be swayed by gimmicks or silly trends. If a restaurant was poor or mediocre, it’d quickly be run out of business.

When hunting for restaurants, Cowen targets ethnic areas with just the right “atmosphere.” When the goal is a magic combination of terrific food at the right price, the signs he looks for are abandoned cars, cheap plastic signs, and five-and-dime stores in the neighborhood. Hey, he’s not saying this is the right atmosphere for a first date, just for good food.

On the other hand, Cowen tends to stay away from restaurants that boast of what most diners would categorize as a good, friendly and fun atmosphere. Specifically, he advises foodies to avoid spots filled with “beautiful, laughing women.” Why? He’s playing the odds that because the place is popular and trendy, the focus is on “the scene” rather than the food, which is all but guaranteed to be overpriced:

The point is not that beautiful women have bad taste in food. Instead, the problem is that they will attract a lot of men to the restaurant, whether or not the place serves excellent food. And that allows the restaurant to cut back on the quality of the food.

Another of Cowen’s unexpected, contrarian insights is highlighted in a USA Today review of his book:

Agribusiness, Cowen says, has made good food ingredients available, along with the drawbacks it has spawned. He uses this analogy: “The printing press brought us both good and bad novels, but was a cultural boon nonetheless.”

Contrary to what some foodies assume, Cowen’s take is that businesses that mass-produce food are not necessarily evil, nor is the food they produce necessarily unhealthy. “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer,” writes Cowen, and by contrast, “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.” Overall, he explains, advances in agribusiness have been good for everyone, bringing food prices down and feeding more people than ever in human history.

Columbia Business: Economist Joins ‘Foodies’

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in Columbia Business on April 30, 2012.

Imagine dining at a Columbia restaurant or shopping at a Columbia grocery store with someone who has a doctorate in ecomonics and is offering a stream of advice.

That sort of approximates the experience of reading “An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.”

Tyler Cowen is a university-based economist obsessed with eating and drinking (obsessed in a good way, once the idea of thinking about food consumption in a new way takes hold). “An Economist Gets Lunch” is a mind-bending book for non-economists. Cowen offers lots of mantras for foodies, and the dominant mantra reads like this: “Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative and the demanders are informed.”

In his own life, Cowen uses the mantra to experience excellent food wherever he goes — in the Washington, D.C., area where he resides (he is on the faculty at George Mason University); in his home kitchen; in other locales across the United States; and in nations around the globe.

Challenging tenets

Cowen opens the book with “a journey into the unknown,” the unknown being the nation of Nicaragua and the journey being about finding delicious, affordable meals.

As he travels through Nicaragua, Cowen is consciously upending three tenets of “food snobbery” that have become conventional wisdom:

• The best food is the most expensive.

• The primary source of cheap food, agribusiness, is evil.

• Chefs, food writers, cultural leaders and political officeholders know best; everyday foodies are not a trusted source of innovation.

Good food is often reasonably priced, Cowen says, and the most expensive restaurants are often serving trendy atmosphere for the upper crust of society rather than focusing on the tastiest meals. In his own neighborhood, Cowen has located outstanding restaurants where the meals are priced under $15. “These favorite restaurants serve diverse items, ranging from Sichuan dan dan noodles to French Epoisses cheeseburgers to red salmon curry to Ethiopian raw beef with chilies and dry cottage cheese.” Further from home, “the best barbecue cooks of Texas are highly skilled applied scientists; you can find chili ecstasy in Albuquerque diners and sometimes even in pharmacies; and the region in Italy with the fewest Michelin-starred restaurants — Sicily — has some of the best, most surprising and also cheapest food in Europe.”

A common denominator, Cowen asserts, is “their on-site owners and chefs are devoted to food they love to prepare.”

USA Today: Review: ‘An Economist Gets Lunch’ Offers New Perspectives

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in USA Today on April 29, 2012.

Every person who wants to stay alive must consume food and drink.

In a sense, that makes everybody an expert on food and drink. But it is the rare consumer of food and drink who swallows with an economist looking on.

Tyler Cowen is an economist obsessed with eating and drinking. Obsessed in a good way, once the idea of thinking about food consumption in a new way takes hold.

An Economist Gets Lunch is a mind-bending book for non-economists. Cowen offers lots of mantras for foodies, the dominant mantra reading like this: “Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.”

In his own life, Cowen uses the mantra to experience excellent food wherever he goes—in the Washington, D.C., area where he is on the faculty at George Mason University; in locales across the United States; and around the globe.

If that sounds somewhat selfish, please know that Cowen is fully aware of the big issues: starvation, daily hunger for many of those not literally starving, obesity, food-related cancers, a lack of food safety, environmental degradation related to food production, corporate farming, greedy agribusiness conglomerates, and more.

He deals with all those issues, especially in the chapters titled “Another Agricultural Revolution, Now” and “Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet.”

Other books may deal more fully and interestingly with the big issues. But Cowen’s book is a thoughtful, offbeat guide to better individual eating for readers with money to prepare food in well-appointed home kitchens, to dine at restaurants near home, and to travel widely away from home while eating experimentally.

Cowen opens with “a journey into the unknown;” the unknown being the nation of Nicaragua and the journey being about finding delicious, affordable meals.

As he travels through Nicaragua, Cowen is consciously upending three tenets of “food snobbery” that have become conventional wisdom:

•The best food is the most expensive.

•Agribusiness, a primary source of cheap food, is evil.

•Chefs, food writers, cultural leaders and political officeholders know best; everyday foodies are not a trusted source of innovation.

Agribusiness, Cowen says, has made good food ingredients available, along with the drawbacks it has spawned. He uses this analogy: “The printing press brought us both good and bad novels, but was a cultural boon nonetheless.”

Good food is often reasonably priced, Cowen says, and the most expensive restaurants are often serving trendy atmosphere rather than focusing on the tastiest meals.

In his own neighborhood, Cowen has found outstanding restaurants where meals are priced under $15.

“These favorite restaurants serve diverse items, ranging from Sichuan dan dan noodles to French Epoisses cheeseburgers to red salmon curry to Ethiopian raw beef with chilies and dry cottage cheese.”

Farther from home, “the best barbecue cooks of Texas are highly skilled applied scientists; you can find chili ecstasy in Albuquerque diners and sometimes even in pharmacies; and the region in Italy with the fewest Michelin-starred restaurants—Sicily—has some of the best, most surprising, and also cheapest food in Europe.”

A common denominator, Cowen asserts: “their on-site owners and chefs are devoted to food they love to prepare.”

For home cooks, Cowen includes well-researched chapters about shopping in ethnic supermarkets and using cookbooks wisely.

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