Is Africa the next big food trend?

by  Tyler Cowen

Josh Schonwald says yes:

One night, after reading about sugar-cane drinks and fresh lobster skewers, I started cooking. I made a spicy okra salad, grilled shrimp piri piri and steamed vanilla pudding. The next night, Zanzibari pizzas—chapati stuffed with eggs, meat and spices. Later, I had a Mozambican seafood stew with Senegalese-style jollof rice. I started seeing it.

…As fast-growing African nations become more prosperous, they will develop something that is rare right now—a middle class with disposable time and income. Poverty, hunger, war and sickness are why Africans—from Cameroon to Mozambique to Namibia to Congo—have been unable to develop a baobab-infused vinaigrette.

I very much enjoyed Josh’s new food book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, and I can recommend it for its pro-science stance, its interesting speculations, and its excellent reporting.  My prediction, by the way, based on demographics, is that the next big food trend will be more from the Latino cuisines, fused with American ideas to appeal to the (North) American palate.  Chipotle is but one step in this direction.  Sadly, in my view most Americans have room for only a few foreign cuisines in their lives.  Thai and Indian are knocking on the door of Mexican and Chinese (all in their American versions), but I do not see new contenders for that throne.

Thiel’s Law

by  Tyler Cowen in

Thiel’s law: A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

That is from the new section of Peter’s lecture notes, recommended of course.  To pose a simple question, how many other people are there in the world you would rather listen to?  Does that not mean Peter is one of the seminal public intellectuals of our time, albeit working through some non-traditional media of communications?

Hat tip goes to The Browser, which by the way is better than The Tatler ever was.

What Americans want

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ask Americans if they are willing to spend more to buy American-made products, and nearly half say they are often willing to do this. But in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, the country where a product is made trails price, quality, and even convenience, as an important factor in consumer decision-making. The public gives even less importance to a product’s brand, its impact on the environment, or the political leanings of the company that produces it.

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Bruce Bartlett.  Once again, here is Bruce’s new book on taxation.

Amy Finkelstein wins the John Bates Clark award

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sorry to be late on this one, but here is the AEA take on her contributions, many of which involve health care economics and the study of health insurance.  I am not sure she was considered an obvious front-runner from the beginning, but in my view it is an excellent pick (without intending any slight to the billions who were passed over).  She is trying to understand the real world, and she is showing that policy economics should not have lower status in academia.  Obviously her major areas of study are topical today.

She does, by the way, have several previous mentions on MR and in retrospect she should have more.  Sarah Kliff adds a bit more.

More from Richard Williamson on the UK

by  Tyler Cowen

Right now, unemployment remains at over 8% in the UK while real wages are lower than they were 7 years ago and are continuing to fall. Yes, you read that correctly. Which immediately leads one to ask: on this explanation of a recession as expounded by Karl, how much further do real wages have to fall to eliminate disequilibrium unemployment?

…I am finding the aggregate demand narrative an increasingly unsatisfying explanation of all that is happening in the British economy. Supply-side suffering is suffering too, and I think we need to take very seriously the chance that it is happening.

Here is his follow-up post.  Do note there is no deflationary downward spiral in the UK.  In a funny way, it is some of the more extreme Keynesian views which lead one to the most extreme stagnationist conclusions.  I know, fiscal policy, fiscal policy, fiscal policy.  But it can’t employ everyone forever.  What does the level of real wages need to be?

Alan Ehrenhalt is skeptical about the new Tysons Corner development, as am I

by  Tyler Cowen in

Some bits from his new book:

The original transit plan…was to place the subway line underground.  That didn’t happen….So rail transit will come to Tysons in the form of a seventy-foot-high elevated track along Route 123 [TC: does he mean Route 7?], with disembarking passengers required to go down to the street and then climb back up a bridge to get to the plaza and the towers.  It’s not exactly the best way to signal the presence of an urban village.

…the hardest part…is the grid…retrofitting seventeen hundred acres of suburban asphalt with a network of walkable streets will be an enormous challenge…The plain truth is that nobody has ever done this before — not on the scale that is being called for at Tysons Corner.

…The residential, retail, and office developers had all delayed their plans for the new walkable city,  a casualty of the national bank lending crunch and a glut of suburban office space.  But the county board had just reaffirmed its support for the entire project, residential towers, gridded streets, and all.

Ehrenhalt does suggest that Tysons has a very good chance of succeeding as “retrofitted suburbia,” but not as a “green pedestrian oasis.”

Here is my previous post on the Ehrenhalt book.

UK economic data — not your standard AD story

by  Tyler Cowen in

Richard Williamson, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

I think there has been a lot missing from the discussion of the UK in the blogosphere. We are a bit of a puzzle on a purely AD-based explanation of the recession.

1) We didn’t have deflation (on annual basis at least), and even stripping out the effect of the VAT rise in 2011 should still show persistent inflation over 3% since 2010
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/inflation-cpi

2) UK inflation expectations seem to be significantly higher here (if falling away a little recently)
http://www.bondvigilantes.com/2012/03/19/markets-start-to-think-about-inflation-again/
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/uk-inflation-expectations-drop-1-093038319.html

3) If you look at table EMP02 here, you can see that the public sector as share of total employment the same in the UK today as in Q1 08, and almost all the decline in *total* employment has been in the private sector (the increase in public sector employment in Q4 08 was due to bank nationalisations)
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/april-2012/index-of-data-tables.html#tab-Employment-tables

I’m not really sure what is going on. But based on my twitter feed today, a lot of other people seem to be. If we were to just look at inflation (at expectations thereof), the country that ought to be having an AD-driven double-dip recession would appear to be the US.

Richard writes again to me:

I would also like to add that any demand issue we have would not appear to be due to ‘austerity’, but rather that we are explicitly targeting inflation in the context of some (as-yet unspecified) supply side problems…

Ps I also think there’s a weird thing about the ‘confidence fairy’ rationale for austerity, where we might expect a government that believes this to tactically *exaggerate* the amount of actual cutting they’re doing, a reversal of usual government incentives.

*The Washington Post* covers *An Economist Gets Lunch*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Cowen fears the effects of gentrification, which tends to drive up real estate rates and drive out ethnic restaurants. It can also lead to blander food. But if defense funding is cut, and the impact is felt locally, that would be a good thing for ethnic restaurants, if not for the populace in general, Cowen said.

And finally, some more helpful tips for ethnic restaurant exploration: ”It’s all about the ordering,” Cowen said. The best places have smaller menus, so they aren’t trying to please everyone, and likely do several things very well. Don’t ask the waiter what’s good, “that will only confuse them.” Instead, ask, “What dish do you have here which is special?” or “What are your regional specialties.”

That is from Tom Jackman, here is more.  Also from the Post today, Tim Carman adds further discussion.

*The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is the excellent Alan Ehrenhalt, here is one bit:

Walking the streets of the Financial District today, one can’t help but think that it is, indeed, a throwback to an earlier version of the city’s life.  But not to the Wall Street of a century ago: That was an economically segregated one-use neighborhood, with offices and virtually nothing else, no residents, hardly a place to shop, only a handful of restaurants to cater to the financial workforce.

But look back farther than that, and you begin to see a resemblance.  In some ways, lower Manhattan in the early twenty-first century has come to resemble lower Manhattan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth: brokers, investors, and insurance agents who live in the neighborhood and walk to work; a social life that does not disappear at quitting time, the way it did twenty years ago; a modest but growing number of families with young children.  Ron Chernow offers a picture of this early lower Manhattan in his biography of Alexander Hamilton, who lived there both as a college student and as a young lawyer.

Recommended, you can buy it here.

Austan Goolsbee is now blogging

by  Tyler Cowen in

He has started with a post on Glenn Hubbard and the budget.  He closes with this:

I agree with Glenn that one of the key debates in the election should be about how America should deal with our long  run budget challenge (that comes from the aging of our population).

And that debate is coming down to one camp saying let’s have cuts to spending and interest around $3 trillion and tax revenue of $1 trillion to hit the deficit cutting target and the other camp saying let’s have cuts of$7 trillion to hit the deficit target plus pay for $3 trillion of tax cuts.

Hubbard closed his op-ed by saying that he just wants people to see the prices on the menu.  Well then, next item: The Romney Budget.  Glenn, you may want to practice your Heimlich maneuver.