Discover Your Inner Economist

"How to Control the World, the Basics." Now, there's an eye-catching chapter title, and a great example of Tyler Cowen's mindset, in evidence throughout Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, a book in which he introduces the science of economics. George Mason University professor and popular blogger Cowen explains that not all incentives are cash-based—in fact, he says, money can be a disincentive—and details how to apply economic reasoning to your professional and personal lives. 

Below, read an author's note from Mr. Cohen, who has graciously agreed to answer your questions and respond to your comments about the book, from August 7-10.     

Author Note:

One good way to find a tasty and cheap meal is to seek out low-rent areas near higher-rent customers. In Los Angeles, eat Mexican food in East Los Angeles or Asian food in Koreatown. There are better food buys in East Hollywood than West Hollywood, where the movie stars live. Good, cheap ethnic food in Manhattan has been pushed away from the center of town; we can do better on 9th Ave. (the far West side), or 1st Ave. (the far East side), than on 5th Ave. or Broadway. Queens and Brooklyn have better and more varied ethnic food than does Park Avenue. If you must try Park Avenue, start below 35th St., and look for cheaper apartments. If you wish to find the undiscovered Mom and Pop restaurant, knowing the real estate prices is often more useful than having a Zagat's Dining Guide.

Manhattan avenues tend to be higher-rent than locations on the streets. Given the long, thin shape of the island, the north-south avenues carry more vehicular and foot traffic. A Fifth Avenue spot will be seen by most city residents and visitors at some point or another. A shopfront on 39th St. will be seen mostly by neighborhood locals. Only a few broad cross-streets, such as 86th or 57th or 14th, take on the economic properties of the up-and-down avenues. If you are stuck in midtown, and you want good, cheap ethnic food, try the streets before the avenues. That neat Korean place can make ends meet on 35th St. but it would not survive on 5th Avenue. In other words, no matter where you are, turning just a bit off the main drag can yield a much better meal for the money.

Taking this logic one step further, we should dine in suburban strip malls, at least if the relevant suburbs have lots of recent immigrants. Most ethnic restaurants in the United States seek low-rent locations. Chinatowns were long ideal for this purpose, but the suburban strip mall has become more important as an outlet for ethnic diversity. It is common to see good ethnic restaurants grouped with mid-level or junky retail. My favorite Chinese restaurant in Virginia is next to a Kinko's, a nail parlor, a Marshall's (low price clothing and furniture), a shop for selling school uniforms, and a store for remaindered Japanese kitchen items and plastic ware.

Low-rent food venues can experiment at little risk. If a food idea does not work out, the proprietor is not left with an expensive building, fancy décor, or a long-term lease. A strip mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in a large shopping mall. The shopping mall restaurant pays a higher rent, and has invested more in décor. It will try to attract a large number of customers, which usually means predictable, mainstream food, that scourge of the dining sophisticate.

If I am in a hitherto unknown part of the United States, the region has immigrants, and I am looking to eat, I head away from the center of town. I look for the strip malls. The best strip malls, for food, are those without Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Large anchor stores encourage too much foot traffic, and then the adjacent ethnic restaurants play to the uninformed crowd rather than to fervent partisans of the cuisine.

Lower rents also mean that more people can try their hand at starting a restaurant. Many more people can try to market the family cooking. Few immigrant families can afford to rent or buy a restaurant space in the middle of downtown Philadelphia, or for that matter in the middle of an upper-middle class shopping center, such as Tysons Corner, South Coast Plaza, or Paramus Park. The people with the best cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money.

The key to understanding the current evolution of dining in the United States is that rents are rising. The expensive places are costing more and more. The ethnic foods found in the middle of high-rent cities are becoming more upscale. The cheap, experimental, and low-décor ethnic foods are moving to the geographic fringes. The same is happening in London, Paris, Berlin, and even Mexico City, among other major urban areas. And just as high rents push out quirky food, so do they push out quirky culture, including clubbing scenes and offbeat art galleries. In New York both ethnic food and experimental music are moving to Brooklyn and Queens, largely because of high rents in Manhattan. Gentrification is good for the neighborhood but it is not always a blessing for culture.

The advantages of low rents help explain why street food and foodstalls are so often so good around the world.

Foodstalls, as found in Asia, Mexico, and many other parts of the developing world, are low-rent venues in the extreme. Typically foodstalls bring together many small "kitchens" under a common roof. In Mexico a single foodstall takes up enough room for a few people to stand and a few tables. The central market of a city might have twenty to one hundred such food stalls, or "comedores," as they are called in Spanish. The customer can buy grandma's cooking, and true regional cuisine, for no more than a dollar or two.

Sadly, foodstalls do not always survive urban development; foodstalls are a low-rent rather than high-rent activity. As city land becomes more valuable, especially in the center, foodstalls and food markets are moved outside the city center. Even in Oaxaca, a Mexican dining capital, the best stalls are now outside the city center. In city centers, more formal cafeterias and restaurants have taken over the customers formerly served by the stalls. The newer venues offer greater selection, and finer eating quarters, but the food is usually blander and less fresh.

The bottom line is this: if you want to eat well, start with an understanding of real estate.