Tyler Cowen replies to my take on why restaurants decline over time and now we’re basically in agreement:
Don’t think of the model as “what happens to a restaurant when there is an exogenous increase in the beauty of its women” (recall Scott Sumner — “don’t reason from a beautiful women [price] change!” ). Think of the model as “what does lots of beautiful women predict about the place of a restaurant in its product life cycle?”
I read the line in the book as making a causal argument that the beautiful women actually induce lower-quality food, but this heuristic interpretation is more consistent with the overall message of An Economist Gets Lunch.
