Noah SmithModify

2026-08-26 17:12:35

I still remember the first time I set foot on Market Street. I was a freshman in college, and big cities were still a very new thing to me. It felt like I was swimming through an ocean of foot traffic; the towering shops and hotels seemed like they were built by giants.

That Market Street is gone now. In its place is a giant empty field of asphalt in the center of San Francisco — a desolate gray waste baking in the sun, empty except for the occasional bus and a tiny smattering of bicycles.

On either side of this yawning wasteland are giant sidewalks with only a few pedestrians, boarded-up stores, and the occasional small, sad retail chain. At midday on a Monday, what was once the bustling commercial heart of San Francisco feels abandoned.

What happened? In fact, Market Street was destroyed by several things:

1. The city’s decision to close the street to cars (but not buses), enacted in 2019

2. The crime wave of the early 2020s

3. The pandemic, and the shift to remote work

The second and third of these, together, are known as the “Doom Loop”. It’s been talked about a lot, so let’s just cover it briefly.

The pandemic, and the economic and social changes it brought, came out of the blue. But San Francisco was particularly vulnerable to the shock. As in many American cities, 20th century urban planning and zoning rules concentrated office buildings in the downtown area and put housing farther out. This meant that once people stopped going downtown for work, the neighborhood was just a lot more empty, because almost no one lives there. This is in contrast to big cities in Europe and Asia, where downtown neighborhoods are typically mixed-use. (SF also had a stronger shift to remote work, because of the heavy presence of the tech industry.)

The crime wave was another shock. Although SF escaped the destructive rioting that hit other West Coast cities like Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles in 2020, it had plenty of looting in downtown areas — especially around Union Square and the San Francisco Centre mall on Market Street. Even after the pandemic ended, San Francisco suffered especially hard from the statewide wave of “smash-and-grab” store thefts. It got so bad that American Eagle actually sued the San Francisco Centre for being negligent toward crime, reporting over 100 serious incidents of violence and harassment in its downtown store.

Crime and emptiness fed on each other. Less foot traffic meant fewer “eyes on the street” to discourage property crime. Property crime and reduced foot traffic forced stores to close. Fewer stores meant less foot traffic, and so on. The collapse of downtown culminated in January 2026 with the closure of the San Francisco Centre, the iconic mall that had formed the commercial heart of Market Street, but which had been gutted by the Doom Loop. It now stands as a looming, empty, boarded-up structure dominating the area around the Powell Street train station:

The intersection of Powell Street and Market Street, once bustling and alive with tourists, shoppers, and street vendors, is now virtually empty, except for a forlorn line of people waiting to get on the iconic streetcar:

But recent years have seen the first glints of recovery from the Doom Loop. For one thing, crime has begun to fall. 2025 alone saw a 27% decrease in property crime, including a 29% decrease in burglaries, a 22% decrease in larceny (including retail theft), and a 24% decrease in robbery. 2026 has seen further drops. The reasons for this are interesting, but I’ll go into them another time. Suffice it to say that this has made downtown SF feel much safer and more orderly. The stereotype of SF as being overrun by drug addicts and dangerous vagrants still holds true of a few areas of the city, but from Powell Street to the bay, the city no longer feels like a post-apocalyptic movie.

Meanwhile, the business district is showing a few sluggish signs of life. The AI boom is causing a (modest) rebound in the demand for office space. Some office buildings are being converted to housing, raising hopes that SF’s downtown can finally become a mixed-use neighborhood. A concerted effort to revive Union Square after the devastation of 2020 is beginning to bear fruit. And both companies and the SF city government are mandating return-to-office policies.

And yet Market Street remains a dead zone. Weekday foot traffic is still down by half compared to 2019:

The wounds inflicted by the Doom Loop will take lots more time and effort to heal. Retail businesses have to be encouraged to open. Defunct buildings have to be torn down and rebuilt. Crime has to be reduced even further, and so on. This will all take years.

But there’s one other factor contributing to the death of San Francisco’s most important street, and it began before the pandemic: The ban on cars.

In recent years, a number of cities around the world have experimented with car-free zones and traffic reduction policies in their downtown areas. The most famous of these is Paris, with its Limited Traffic Zone, its expansion of pedestrian malls, and its road closures during Sundays and holidays. Shortly before the pandemic, San Francisco decided to enact a plan its leaders thought was in the same spirit: closing downtown Market Street to all car traffic:

But although Market Street was closed to cars, it wasn’t closed to buses, delivery trucks, and licensed taxis. This was in keeping with the general “transit good, cars bad” thinking of modern progressive urbanism. But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic. This mathematically guaranteed that Market Street would become a more empty place: Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren’t added.

The direct cost of this policy is pretty obvious. When people can’t park in a parking garage on Market, and when Uber and Lyft can’t pick people up and drop people off on the street, it makes businesses on the street less attractive to visit. Sure, people could bike or take the train, but not everyone wants to do that; instead, they’ll just go to restaurants or stores in other areas. In addition, restaurants on Market Street now can’t deliver food, cutting them off from an important source of revenue. That probably helps explain why Market has suffered more from the Doom Loop than other areas.

But what did SF gain by deleting cars from Market Street and adding nothing at all in their place? Cars create a little bit of pollution (though modern cars are very clean), so that was removed. Pedestrians who run off the sidewalk and into the street are somewhat less in danger of being killed (though still in danger). These are meager benefits indeed.

What about bike traffic? Presumably, reduced danger of being hit by a car would allow more cyclists to ride down Market Street. But in fact, bike traffic on the street is considerably lower than it was pre-pandemic:

A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.

One reason might be that although the city planned to make the car-free stretch of Market more bike-friendly, it never really followed up on those plans. So it’s still pretty dangerous to ride a bike or scooter down the street — you can get caught in the train tracks, and you can get hit by a bus or truck.

In fact, this sloppy implementation is a general pattern with the Market Street closure. Josh Koehn had a great article in 2023 about how the plan degenerated from its initial form:

A $600 million capital project called Better Market Street promised to create a futuristic boulevard that would safely buffer bicycles and scooters on elevated sidewalk lanes, separating the little wheels from rapid bus lines, vintage streetcars and pedestrians…The new vision for Market Street, advocates said, would create a safer, more vibrant multimodal avenue…More than a decade of planning went into alterations of Market Street…

But funds for anything beyond modest improvements along a three-block stretch of Market Street between Fifth and Eighth streets…have evaporated…The cost of Better Market Street, which soared above a billion dollars before being reined in to a still-staggering $604 million, is almost double the amount spent on the tormented Van Ness Avenue redesign…

City officials enraged safe streets advocates when they announced in late 2020 that the elevated bike lanes on sidewalks would be scrapped.

SF’s lack of state capacity had a lot to do with this; constant cost overruns inevitably require ambitious projects to be scaled back. The pandemic also obviously got in the way. But part of what killed the vision for Market Street is simply that the vision itself was never very good.

If you look at Paris, it’s immediately clear how that city’s car-limitation measures were designed to create spaces for pedestrians. In certain areas like the banks of the Seine, Paris didn’t just ban cars; it also banned buses and trucks, so that people could walk safely. Paris also reserved much larger areas for pedestrians on certain days.

But Market Street has no more pedestrian areas than it did in 2019. You can still only walk on the sidewalk. If the entire street were reserved for foot traffic during certain times — like SF does with Valencia Street, for example — then these periodic temporary pedestrianizations could become an event that regularly draws lots of people to the area. This could include farmers’ markets, street concerts, and other fun events. Those would give people a reason to walk around Market Street even before new businesses opened.

Alternatively, if SF permanently closed off some portion of the street to buses and trucks, that stretch of road could become a pedestrian public square, similar to the center of Times Square:

Instead of thinking about how to create spaces that people would actually want to walk around in, the SF government — and the many activist groups and nonprofits that influence its policy — appear to have adhered to the simple rule of “bikes and buses good, cars bad”.

This is a way of thinking centered around modes of transit rather than public space. It implicitly conceives of areas like Market Street as thoroughfares to take people from one place to another, rather than as actual destinations. Market Street’s car closure is all about forcing people to go down Market Street in a different way, rather than about encouraging people to go to Market Street.

There’s something inescapably and depressingly suburban about this way of thinking. In the suburbs, life is lived point-to-point — you go from house to strip-mall to restaurant to office without thinking much about the places you traverse in between. In a suburb, the mode of transportation — how you get from Point A to Point B — is the important question.

Americans are a suburban people; even many of our urban areas look like suburbs in other countries. So perhaps it’s inevitable that the urbanists who closed Market Street off to car traffic would think entirely about modes of transportation and ignore the vibrant city center whose destruction they exacerbated. Instead of Jane Jacobs, they ended up just being the Robert Moses of buses.

Again, careful attention to car limitations in cities like Paris, where people are used to occupying urban places instead of simply whizzing through them, would have proven enlightening. Paris’s Limited Traffic Zone doesn’t ban cars in downtown areas; it merely bans cars from transiting through those areas. People who stay within the area can still drive. The point is to make downtown spaces into places people occupy rather than places people simply go through. What San Francisco did to Market Street was, in many ways, the exact opposite.

In lieu of turning Market Street into a pedestrian paradise, SF’s best move is probably just to allow private cars again. It’s not the optimal way to create more foot traffic to nourish retail businesses, but it’s the quickest and easiest. In fact, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made moves in this direction, allowing certain Uber, Lyft, and Waymo cars to operate on the street. But they might as well simply go all the way. Best to simply bury the era when Market Street was a large empty scar commemorating the decline of San Francisco; if San Francisco can’t be Paris, at least it can return to what it used to be.

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2026-08-24 16:46:48

It’s hardly news that Americans are not happy with the state of their nation. Confidence in the country’s direction crashed hard during the Bush years and never recovered. But what’s notable about more recent years is Americans’ increasing dissatisfaction with their personal lives:1

This decline looks pretty mild, but other numbers tell an even starker story. For example, happiness surveys show an increasingly despondent populace:

Suicide has been slowly rising as well. And then there’s consumer sentiment:

For intellectuals and commentators such as myself, for many policy wonks and academics, and even for many politicians, the question is how to make the American people happier. And the answers we come up with are usually economic ones — ideas for policies that will improve the material well-being of either the whole populace, or some segment of it.

This is common on both sides of the aisle. On the left, centrists have embraced the Abundance movement, whose main idea is to give Americans more stuff — more housing, electricity, health care, and so on. For progressives and leftists, meanwhile, Medicare for All is probably the centerpiece idea. On the right, Trump’s trade agenda has usually been justified with claims that it will return good manufacturing jobs to the American working class. Even immigration restriction is usually couched in economic terms — the MAGA people claim that mass deportations will open up jobs for Americans, lower the price of housing, and so on.

The roots of the country’s malaise, too, are often described in economic terms. Many people claim that the First China Shock — and the loss of good blue-collar jobs to offshoring more generally — left a disappointed, angry working class in its wake. Progressives decry corporate landlords that they claim raise the cost of housing, and blame grocery stores’ greed for the rising cost of food. Practically everyone agrees that inflation was the biggest reason Trump won the 2024 election.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against a lot of these ideas (and in favor of a few of them). But I almost always accept the basic frame that A) many of America’s problems are due to economic malaise, and B) we ought to focus on finding ways to make Americans richer. Partly, this is because I was trained as an economist; I recognize that things like culture wars are also important to Americans, but I don’t have much special expertise in that area. But partly, I think I just subscribe to the general tendency of American intellectuals to focus on the material.

I was thinking of this as I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay, “Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed.” Kang argues that the young, educated, angry voters who currently form the Democrats’ base can be separated into two basic groups: Millennials who are mad about the raw economic deal they received during and after the Great Recession, and Zoomers who are mad about Covid and Palestine. Here he describes the first of these groups:

This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances.

For a long time, I basically bought the narrative that at least some of the unrest of the 2010s was due to angry Millennials who had gotten screwed by the Great Recession. It makes intuitive sense that a generation who were on the losing end of such a vivid demonstration of economic risk would turn toward policies that decrease economic risk — like government health insurance and rent control. It also makes sense that they’d want student debt forgiveness.

But as time has gone on and I’ve seen Millennials do better and better economically, I’ve begun to doubt this narrative. Corinth and Larrimore (2026) write:

We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women…Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

And here’s a chart:

It’s not just government redistribution giving Millennials a boost. By the time they hit their mid 30s, their market income was well ahead of Gen X or the Boomers (and yes, this is adjusted for the cost of living). They had caught up in wealth, too:

Now, is it possible that even though Millennials eventually did OK, the disruptions of their 20s created a scarring experience that they’ve never forgotten? Yes, it is absolutely possible. But it’s also notable that the kind of economic policies lefty Millennials demand — especially universal health insurance — don’t really address the main kinds of risks they experienced in their youth (unemployment and wage declines).

On the right, it’s notable that the economic policies Trump has unleashed have not helped the people they were supposedly designed to help. Manufacturing employment has fallen since Trump took office and started putting tariffs on anyone and everyone:

So much for those blue-collar jobs coming back. Meanwhile, mass deportations and a near-cessation of net immigration to the U.S. have spectacularly failed to raise employment rates for native-born Americans:

It’s possible, of course, that Trump’s supporters think his policies will take a long time to work, or perhaps they simply aren’t very aware of what’s going on in the economy. I kind of doubt this, though. Americans as a whole have noticed, which is why Trump’s approval rating is in the gutter and inflation — the most important economic issue at the moment — is the issue on which voters are most angry at Trump:

So it’s possible that Trump’s voters were just tricked into thinking he was better on economics than he was. On the margin, that’s probably true. But the fact that Trump’s base has stuck with him strongly implies that economics was not their primary concern.

In fact, there was a whole huge debate among political scientists and economists about whether Trump’s victory in 2016 was due to “economic anxiety” or to sociocultural issues. In the end, the “economic anxiety” hypothesis generally lost out. Here’s Margalit (2019):

Empirical findings indicate that the share of populist support explained by economic insecurity is modest. Second, recent evidence indicates that voters' concern with immigration—a key issue for many populist parties—is only marginally shaped by its real or perceived repercussions on their economic standing.

On the left, I think there’s pretty good evidence that economic issues are not foremost in the minds of the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party. The political analyst David Shor has found that the issues Democratic donors and activists care about are just different from the bread-and-butter economic concerns that motivate swing voters:

In reality, Shor says, young party staffers are far to the left of the median Democratic voters on relatively uncontroversial, bread-and-butter Democratic priorities like combatting income inequality or addressing climate change. In their 2015 paper, for instance, Enos and Hirsch found that 23 percent of Obama staffers cited income inequality as the single most important issue facing the country, whereas polls from that election cycle found that fewer than one percent of all voters listed “the gap between rich and poor” as the most important issue. Enos and Hirsch also found that campaign workers were more likely to cite health care and inequality as an important issue to voters — even though most voters did not list those as high-priority issues and said they were more concerned about things like war and inflation.

And although much has been made of the fact that low-income highly-educated voters tend to break strongly for the Democrats, it turns out that high-income highly-educated folks also vote blue:

In fact, in his essay, Kang describes Gen Z voters as caring less about the economy than about Palestine:

Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote…A majority of young Democrats believe that their tax dollars are funding a genocide; candidates like Melat Kiros, who defeated the longtime Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette in a primary, are running to the left of progressive incumbents not so much on economic issues as in their condemnation of Israel and of America’s continued military aid to the country.

The name Kang assigns to these voters — the “Great Disappointed” — seems at first to imply some kind of economic disappointment. But it turns out he just means they’re angry about foreign policy stuff that they see in the news.

In fact, a lot of committed DSA types are actually post-economic. The Gen Z political strategists who recruited Graham Platner to run for Senate, Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, were found to be scions of very wealthy families. Similar stories keep popping up:

If people like this are “disappointed”, their disappointments have little to do with their material standard of living.

In other words, over the past decade I’ve increasingly come to doubt that economic policies and programs can address the true concerns of the people driving American politics. Yes, economics still matters, of course — for humanitarian reasons, if nothing else. And yes, there are still a lot of voters who care about inflation, jobs, and other economic issues. But these are not necessarily the people setting the agenda in American politics or causing unrest in American society.

Even where “normie” voters are concerned, though, it’s proving maddeningly hard to craft economic policies that give them what they want. Even though inflation fell from 9% in the summer of 2022 to just 3% in the summer of 2023, voters still seemed to punish Democrats at the polls in 2024.

And although inflation during Trump’s current term has never approached anything resembling 2022, voters still say they’re incredibly mad at Trump over inflation.

With a robust job market, low-ish inflation, and decent economic growth, analysts have struggled to figure out why consumer sentiment — at least, as measured by UMich — is at all-time lows. At a loss, commentators have been reduced to talking about “vibes” — basically a label for our ignorance.

Every time a policy wonk thinks about some measure that would increase GDP by 0.4%, or create 200,000 jobs, or lower inflation by 40 basis points, they need to think about the unpleasant reality that Americans may simply not care very much. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to help people economically, but it means that economics may ultimately not be the lever we need to pull if we’re going to make the people of this country happy and satisfied again.

We should therefore think about whether our primary social problems are actually about material scarcity. The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago. It seems plausible to think that a great many Americans have climbed to the higher rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — that instead of where to get their next meal or how to save for retirement, they’re thinking about how to feel like they belong in their society, or how to get more status and respect.

A large contingent of Americans may now simply care less about adding to their bank accounts than about questions like “Who are the real Americans?”, or “Does one race deserve special treatment in the eyes of the law?”, or “Why do some of the people I went to college with have 10,000 times as much wealth as I do?”. As long as those questions remain unanswered, boosting Americans’ economic fortunes could have little effect on their happiness.

Neither the discipline of economics nor our typical policy discourse is set up to deal with issues like belonging, social status, or respect. There’s no market for these things; people with wealth might be more respected, but you can’t buy respect on Amazon. And some of these psychological needs are positional goods — for the status of one person or group to be higher, someone else’s status often has to be diminished.

Not only is modern economics poorly set up to deal with those kinds of things, it often bothers us to even talk about them. A world dominated by positional goods — where one person having more requires that someone else have less — is a dark, zero-sum world. We would much prefer to work toward a world where everyone wins.

And yet like it or not, this may now be the world in which we find ourselves. Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.

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2026-08-22 09:47:17

“Gradually, then suddenly.” — The Sun Also Rises

Lots of people are worried about rising long-term interest rates. Short-term interest rates are controlled by the central bank. But the Fed doesn’t usually intervene in the market for longer-term bonds, so when these interest rates move around, it means the market is telling us something. So a lot of people were worried when the yield on 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds jumped by 6 basis points (0.06%) the other day.

Why were people scared? Well, remember that when interest rates go up, it means bond prices went down. Which means that fewer people wanted to buy U.S. government bonds. This could be a signal of several bad things:

1. It could signal expectations of higher inflation. When future money will be worth less, bond investors demand higher interest rates today. Higher inflation also means the Fed will probably raise interest rates.

2. It could signal a loss of confidence in the U.S. government. If people think there’s a possibility that the U.S. won’t repay its debts, they will charge a higher risk premium to hold that debt. These doubting investors are sometimes called “bond vigilantes”. Bond vigilantes could be scared by soaring U.S. debt levels and deficits, and/or by irresponsible geopolitical and economic policies from the Trump administration.

Here’s John Cochrane on the specter of the bond vigilantes:

Unsustainable fiscal policies can only go on so long. Eventually bond investors decide that the US will not in the end do the right thing after trying everything else, and default, expropriation, taxation, capital controls, or sharp inflation is on its way. They stop buying long-term bonds especially, and look to the comfort of short term bonds…For some reason there is limited demand for long-term treasury debt…

The beginning of a global sovereign debt retrenchment would show up first in a feeling of limited demand…Investors, seeing trouble demand a larger risk premium for longer term debt…Moving to short maturity structures is a classic symptom of trouble ahead.

Among the people who were scared by the rise in interest rates, apparently, were the Trump administration. Higher long-term interest rates mean higher mortgage rates,1 which make American voters mad. They also make it harder for the U.S. government to finance its enormous deficits. So Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the government was intervening in the bond market, with a program to buy long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. This pushed up bond prices — and pushed down interest rates — for exactly one day, but then the bond markets bounced right back:2

US Treasuries fell a day after the Trump administration’s surprise decision to increase buybacks of longer-dated bonds…The 30-year yield on Thursday rose over seven basis points to as much as 5.27%, where it was just ahead of the US Treasury Department’s announcement early Wednesday.

So are we watching the collapse of confidence in the U.S. government? Is this the beginning of bankruptcy for Uncle Sam? Probably not yet. The underlying trends of excessive borrowing and boneheaded policies do bear keeping an eye on, and collapses of investor confidence can happen fast once they begin. But it’s unlikely that a true sovereign debt crisis has begun.

How much are interest rates actually up by?

One reason I’m not terrified by the rise in long-term rates is that it’s not actually that big of a rise!

In stories about rising rates, you see a lot of charts about how it’s a global phenomenon:

This has interesting implications, but first, notice that except for Japan, most of the rise was actually in 2021-2023. So whatever happened to make bond investors demand higher rates, most of it happened years ago.

Here’s just the U.S., zoomed out to cover the last decade:

Long-term rates fell in 2019 and bottomed out during the pandemic, then in 2022 and 2023 they had a big sustained rise. In comparison, the rise since early 2026 has been very small — only a few tenths of a percent.

That could be the beginning of a catastrophic rise, and of course when you’re carrying as much debt as the U.S. government is, even a small increase in borrowing costs can be a headache if it’s sustained over a long period of time. But I just can’t look at that little wiggle in 2026 and see evidence of a bond market collapse. You should be very worried about the U.S. national debt, but this rise in rates should only make you a tiny bit more worried, if at all.

So what is behind the (small) rise in long-term rates? There are three basic possibilities.

Is it inflation?

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2026-08-20 07:27:31

The Economist has an interesting article this week, in which it goes after Daron Acemoglu. Acemoglu is probably the top economist in the world at this point, having just earned a Nobel prize, and sitting right at the top of the list of most cited economists. So it’s kind of funny that when it talks about people who doubt Acemoglu’s research, the one person it mentions is…me!

Give an economist a few drinks, however, and some of them will venture their true opinions about this giant. “Much of his theoretical work is useful, but he uses his models to inform populist policies that have been tried before and failed,” blasts one well-known economist. Some commentators do not require Dutch courage. “I’ve been yelling about Acemoglu for literally a decade,” Noah Smith, an economics blogger, has said, in response to a flurry of online criticism of Mr Acemoglu’s work.

(For the record, The Economist did not actually interview or contact me for this article. Their quote of me was from a tweet from June, which they did not link to in the article.)

It is true that I have been pretty critical of much of Acemoglu’s work over the years. In 2012 I argued strongly against a paper he wrote in which he claimed that America is more entrepreneurial than Sweden because America’s weaker safety net forces people to work harder (in actuality, Sweden is more entrepreneurial by most measures). In 2022 I pointed out that a famous Acemoglu paper claiming that robots destroy jobs was actually an outlier, and listed a bunch of other papers that reach the opposite conclusion. I liked his book Why Nations Fail, but I also admit that its empirical foundations are fairly shaky. I didn’t like Acemoglu’s more recent book Power and Progress, and I was highly critical of a recent paper Acemoglu wrote about AI and productivity.1 I also think Acemoglu’s argument that skilled immigration has crippled the American education system — now being heavily cited by Breitbart and such — is extremely implausible.

But this is hardly newsworthy. I go after Acemoglu’s work because I know he can take it; he’s a titan of the economics field, and I am but a lowly blogger. Nothing I say is going to affect his reputation or his prestige, even if someone at The Economist mentions my critiques in an article. Indeed, after the article came out, top figures in the profession rushed to condemn it and to defend Acemoglu. The Economist does list a bunch of — usually justified — criticisms of Acemoglu’s work, but this does not mean Acemoglu has been discredited as a researcher or exposed as overrated; indeed, it would be difficult to name a top economist whose body of work does not contain a variety of questionable theoretical assumptions, motivated reasoning, and/or shaky empirical results. This is a problem with the field itself, not the man; it’s part of a broader crisis of unreliability throughout much of academia.

But for that same reason, despite the Economist article’s lack of newsworthiness, I think it’s good that the magazine decided to come at the king. Economics is far too hierarchical and closed of a profession. Younger and less accomplished researchers routinely defer to the authority of famous and senior figures, and critics from outside the field are typically brushed off. Exactly how it got to be this way is a topic that deserves a longer post, but I believe the hierarchical, closed culture of econ has resulted in a research literature that has been too skewed toward the priorities and intuition of top authority figures. I thus think it’s generally a healthy thing to tweak the tails of those Olympian figures, as long as criticisms are grounded in substance. As they say, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

So in that spirit, let’s critique another Acemoglu paper.

First, the background. Recently, a lot of people (including myself, but also prominent economists) have begun worrying about low fertility rates. Across all countries — poor as well as rich — fertility just keeps going down and down, with no floor in sight.

This presents two distinct dangers: population aging and population shrinkage. Aging, rather mechanically, creates a burden for young people, because you have more retirees who have to be supported by each worker, either through taxes or through family support. It also might reduce productivity, for example if older managers are less innovative, but that’s more speculative. Population shrinkage, meanwhile, is a threat to total GDP, which you might care about if you want your country to be more powerful. There’s also the possibility that a smaller population might reduce growth — by reducing the opportunities for specialization, or by reducing the available pool of researchers.

But some people argue that a shrinking population is no problem — or might even be a good thing. When you make human workers scarce, it creates an incentive to invest in labor-saving technology, which boosts productivity. This mechanism has been proposed by some growth theorists, and some economic historians, like Robert Allen, even think this is what caused the Industrial Revolution! This effect might be strong enough to cancel out the aggregate effect of population aging, so that society stays just as rich — or even gets richer — due to low fertility rates.

This is actually a plausible mechanism. I have to say, I’m skeptical that it works in the general case. Human beings aren’t just labor supply; they also create labor demand. The incentive for businesses to buy new machine tools, robots, AI, etc. is that someone is going to buy the stuff they produce with those tools. If you have fewer people, you have fewer consumers. This is probably the reason why the effect of immigration on wages is typically close to zero. Babies are not that different from immigrants. A larger market size can also create an incentive for more rapid innovation — in fact, Acemoglu and Linn (2004) find that faster population growth increases pharmaceutical innovation.2

But anyway, the idea that population scarcity stimulates innovation is the thesis of a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Keelan Beirne, and Andrew Scott. This is from the abstract:

Contrary to the widespread expectation that [low birth rates] hamper economic growth, we find lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in GDP per working-age adult across countries and higher wage growth across US commuting zones, with no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings. These patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms. We argue that they reflect the endogenous, labor-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers. Consistent with this interpretation, countries and regions with lower birth rates exhibit more labor-saving patents and growing high-tech activity. There is also higher TFP growth across countries and industries. [emphasis mine]

It’s a plausible result. But before we go on to the details of the paper, let’s talk about what this result would imply, if it does turn out to be true.

One of the paper’s basic theses is that technological automation raises wages. That flies in the face of the empirical work that Acemoglu has done on robots.3 It also more broadly seems to contradict what Acemoglu has been saying about AI, both in his research papers and in his public statements. In his 2024 paper, “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”, Acemoglu writes that “predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years [from AI] are…predicted to be less than 0.53%.” In his 2021 paper, “Harms of AI”, Acemoglu writes:

I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include: damaging competition, consumer privacy and consumer choice; excessively automating work, fueling inequality, inefficiently pushing down wages, and failing to improve worker productivity. [emphasis mine]

This stands in direct contradiction to Acemoglu’s new paper with Autor, Beirne, and Scott. If modern automation technologies push down wages without raising productivity, it cannot compensate for population aging in the way that Acemoglu, Autor, Beirne, and Scott claim that it must — and therefore, population aging is dangerous in a way that it wasn’t before.

Now, it’s fine for a researcher to find two seemingly contradictory things — or even put forward two contradictory theories — in two different papers. The real world is messy and complicated, and there are plenty of “puzzles” in the literature. But if Acemoglu goes around simultaneously telling us:

1. not to worry about population aging, because automation will compensate for it with higher productivity and higher wages, and

2. to worry a lot about automation, because it pushes down wages without raising productivity much…

…then we have a problem.4

But anyway, on to the actual details of Acemoglu et al. (2026). First of all, I’m not convinced by their result that lower birth rates raise living standards at the country level. The reason is that once they control for a bunch of stuff — education, urbanization, geographic region, etc. — the result loses statistical significance. Here’s their Table 1, with the estimates I’m talking about circled in red:

In their abstract, the authors declare that “these patterns are not explained by educational upgrading, rising female labor force participation, the declining importance of agriculture, or neoclassical-Solow mechanisms.” But at least some of these patterns can apparently be explained by other things — initial education levels, urbanization, and so on — which makes the claim in the abstract a lot less impressive than it sounds.5

Also, note that the more controls the authors add, the weaker the estimated effect becomes. That’s generally a red flag in empirical papers. No matter how smart and careful you are, there are always things you don’t control for, especially in a cross-country regression, since countries differ in so many ways. So if the things you do control for tend to weaken your headline result by a lot, you should be worried that the rest of your result can be explained by the controls you left out.

For example, what about institutions, which Acemoglu has spent much of his career telling us are the main determinants of development? If the legacy of colonialism can be canceled out by passing out free condoms, why did Acemoglu win a Nobel prize? The word “institutions” does not even appear once in this new paper!6

A more realistic possibility is that lower birth rates in 1940 were correlated with other things — maybe a lot of other things — and that it’s these other things, rather than birth rates, that give rise to the correlation in the paper.

Of course, what we ultimately care about isn’t GDP per working-age adult7 — it’s GDP per capita. The authors have data on GDP per capita, but they barely mention it in the analysis;8 I’m not sure why. They do look at total GDP, and here they find no correlation, but a big standard error:

We shouldn’t interpret absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Cross-country regressions have small samples and tons of heterogeneity, so their standard errors tend to be huge — they just have trouble explaining much about the world. But the authors sort of blur this line, saying things like “no negative impact on aggregate GDP or earnings”, when really they should say “we can’t find a negative impact.” There could be a positive relationship between birth rates and growth hiding in that cloud of data points. (Sadly, this is standard practice in economics, but it makes a difference in how results get sold.)

Anyway, the result for wages in U.S. commuting zones holds up somewhat better. It’s a bit more statistically significant, and it doesn’t get attenuated as much by adding controls. But here, I’m worried about different issues: sorting and clustering. Basically, the result shows that coastal cities — places like New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc. — had both lower birth rates in 1940 and faster wage growth from 1970 to 2020. The authors’ interpretation is that businesses in NYC, SF, and Boston had fewer workers, and so were forced to embrace labor-saving automation, while businesses in places like Birmingham, Alabama or Gary, Indiana refused to automate because they were endowed with plentiful cheap labor thanks to the legacy of an extra-large Baby Boom.

I am suspicious of this result, because American cities are not independent of each other. People can pretty easily move from Gary, Indiana to Boston, and vice versa! Ideas and capital can move even more easily — it’s pretty trivial for a company that patents a robot in Boston to actually put that robot to work in Gary. In fact, things like this happen all the time in America. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) note that the commuting zones with the greatest exposure to robots include Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Defiance, OH, Lorain, OH, Muncie, IN, Racine, WI, and Wilmington, DE.

Just to take one example of how different regions in America are dependent on each other, suppose that over the period from 1970 to 2020, Americans with lots of talent tended to move from Gary to Boston in order to take advantage of the increasing number of knowledge-industry jobs there. And suppose that at the same time, less talented Americans moved from Boston to Gary, in order to take advantage of the cheap land there. And suppose that high-value industries, like biotech and robotics and software, simultaneously decided to put their research labs in Boston rather than Gary because that’s where the best workers were headed.

In this case, you’d see Boston grow more than Gary, for reasons that had nothing to do with birth-rate-driven labor supply. Other research — for example, by Enrico Moretti — has shown that the sorting of talent and knowledge industries was strongly correlated with income divergences between American regions after 1970. Now, Acemoglu et al. do control for initial local education levels, but if sorting really began after 1970 (as Moretti has shown), that doesn’t really help. They also use “composition-adjusted” wages that try to model what local wages would be if education levels were held constant. But even if that adjustment is valid,9 it’s likely that a lot of skills aren’t captured by simply measuring who has a college degree.10

So in Acemoglu et al.’s telling, a substantial part of the reason the San Francisco Bay Area became Silicon Valley is not because the tech industry naturally tends to cluster in certain locations and draw in talented engineers and entrepreneurs, but because people in the Bay Area in 1940 didn’t have many kids, which forced Bay Area businesses to embrace automation instead. I simply don’t buy that story. I might eventually be persuaded to buy that story, but I don’t think this paper has sufficient evidence to persuade me yet.

Anyway, I am not claiming that Acemoglu et al. (2026) is a crappy paper. It’s clearly an important addition to the literature, and it deals with a very hard area of research where definitive results are very scarce. The basic idea is worth taking seriously. Maybe in a world where AI is growing by leaps and bounds, a scarcity of human workers should be the last thing on our minds!

But we shouldn’t regard this paper as definitive. And it contradicts a bunch of other research:

• Kremer (1993) finds evidence that regions with faster population growth had faster technological progress.

• The endogenous growth literature argues that because ideas are nonrival, larger populations are able to sustain faster technological progress — this is a basic assumption in Romer (1990), Jones (2022), and many other models.

• Maestas, Mullen, and Powell (2023) find that aging was negatively correlated with productivity growth among U.S. states from 1980 to 2010;11 Ozimek, DeAntonio, and Zandi (2018) find something similar.

• Aksoy et al. (2019) do a panel time-series regression across OECD countries from 1970 to 2014, and find that low fertility and low population growth are correlated with slower economic growth.

And even if Acemoglu et al. (2026) is right about the past, that doesn’t mean we can extrapolate it to the future. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde points out that you can’t necessarily do a linear extrapolation of effects at above-replacement fertility to effects at below-replacement fertility:

The fertility collapse now underway has no historical precedent. The seven decades of data the [Acemoglu et al. (2026)] paper analyzes, however carefully, contain nothing remotely comparable to the ultra-low fertility rates we observe today…

[T]he birth and fertility rates of 1950 provide little information about the consequences of the ultra-low birth and fertility rates we are experiencing today. Observations from a very different range of values are unlikely to capture the nonlinear cumulative effects of ultra-low birth and fertility rates…[E]ven in 1980, birth and fertility rates were not as low as they are today…A TFR of 1.56 means each generation is 76% the size of the last: the population declines about 0.9% per year, so after 100 years you retain roughly 40% of the initial population. A TFR of 0.75 means each generation is 37% of the last: about a 3.35% decline per year, leaving roughly 3.5% after a century. Hence, we are dealing with a factor of about 11. A TFR of 1.56 and a TFR of 0.75 both count as “low fertility” in a regression, but they are qualitatively different regimes. The 1980 variation the paper identifies lives in the gentle-decline world; nothing in their data resembles the second…

[W]e should not fool ourselves: we are sailing into demographic terra incognita, and in these waters, the pretense of knowledge is the most dangerous temptation.

In fact, Hayashi (2025) documents just such a nonlinear relationship between aging and growth, where countries with above-replacement fertility seem to benefit from lower birth rates, but countries with below-replacement fertility seem to do worse when their birth rates fall even further.12

External validity and nonlinearity are big problems in much of growth economics, development economics, economic history, and so on (and often in other fields too). But it means that there’s a danger, when the world’s top economist writes a paper making big bold claims, that we end up deferring to that individual’s intellectual authority instead of recognizing the true uncertainty of the unprecedented changes our world is facing. I’m still very worried about the shrinkage of the human race, and I think you should probably still be worried too.

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2026-08-18 13:21:55

There’s actually a tradition of economics bloggers giving recommendations about where (and how) to eat out. Tyler Cowen wrote a whole book on the subject, as well as various blog posts, and maintains an Ethnic Dining Guide on the web! I’m not going to be that thorough or go that deep. But over the last year I’ve gone to quite a few restaurants in San Francisco, so I thought I might share what I’ve learned.

In fact, this quest was born out of contrarianism. A lot of people say that the restaurant scene in San Francisco is mediocre, boring, or disappointing. The haters range from food critics and New York chefs to some SF residents themselves. I’ve lived in this city for a decade now, and although the restaurant scene here isn’t the best I’ve found — NYC and LA are better, and Japanese cities just annihilate all competition — I’ve always found plenty of good places to eat. When people portray SF as some sort of food desert, I’m convinced it’s a skill issue.

So to be thorough, I set out to try all of the good restaurants in the entire city. That’s a project that’s bound to fail, of course — there are just too many, and quality can vary over time, and places are always opening and closing. But at this point I think I’ve eaten at enough places to write a fairly authoritative guide to restaurants in San Francisco.

What this guide is and is not

Writing about food is an inherently difficult thing to do, because taste doesn’t easily translate into language. There are plenty of reasons for this, including:

• People don’t biologically experience the same taste the same way. The most famous example is how some people taste cilantro like soap due to a variation in one particular gene. But there are lots of other examples. When I try to describe the taste of a particular dish or ingredient, chances are that your physical experience of it will be different from what I experienced, and you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering if I’m an alien.

• Even if people did experience tastes the same way, people’s preferences would probably differ radically on most things. Some of this is due to personal associations — conditioned taste aversion is very much a thing, for example. There are probably lots of other reasons as well. It isn’t just what we like and dislike, either — how much we like and dislike each combination of tastes can make the difference in whether we like a restaurant overall.

• Culinary experiences are not very uniform across the population, so we haven’t been able to develop as much of a shared vocabulary to describe what we’re tasting — if I’ve eaten Sichuan pepper and you haven’t, it’s a little like trying to describe the color red to a blind person. And since most people have only eaten a small percentage of what there is to eat in the world, the region of overlapping experience across the entire population is small; thus, we simply don’t have many words that refer to taste experiences that most people have had.1

To see how hard it is to describe food in words, try the following exercise. Pick five restaurants you like, and five you don’t like, and mix them together in a list. Ask your favorite AI chatbot to pick five of these that you should go to, and five you should avoid, and ask it to explain why you’d like and dislike them. Chances are you’ll have no idea what it’s talking about. AI can do the most advanced math on Earth, but describing taste in words is an exercise for which good training data simply doesn’t exist.

So when I say my restaurant guide is “authoritative”, I don’t mean I’m an authority. I just mean I’ve been to a lot of restaurants, and I know which ones I like and don’t like, and I can describe why I like and dislike them in terms that make sense to me. But obviously this is all just me describing my subjective experience and hoping that it resonates with you. So when you go through this guide and find yourself nodding in vigorous agreement with some of the recommendations, and screwing up your face in confusion at others, well…I warned you.

Also, I’m not well-versed in the art of food criticism, so I’m not going to try very hard to describe the tastes I experienced at these restaurants. But I am pretty well-versed in the art of noticing patterns and thinking about explanations for things, and so this guide is going to focus less on the particulars of various dishes than on questions like “Why is SF’s food scene not the best in the country?” and “What kinds of restaurants are generally good in SF?”.

As for my recommendations themselves, my criterion for ranking restaurants highly isn’t just how good they are. It’s what I call “yums per dollar”2 — basically, whether the culinary experience you got was worth the price you paid. So I’m perfectly happy ranking a good taqueria up there with a Michelin-star place.

Speaking of Michelin-star places, I’ve decided not to include any places that are over $150 a person or so (before tax and tip). That’s already quite expensive, and I don’t want to be the kind of guy who recommends people to a bunch of restaurants they can’t afford to go to. And quite frankly, I’ve only been to one or two of those anyway. So, apologies to Benu, Quince, Californios, and the rest of those guys.

Finally, I’ve eaten at several hundred restaurants in SF, but that’s only about 10% of the total. So if you have some recommendations for good ones I should try, feel free to drop them in the comments. And of course this post is just Part 1 in a series; Part 2 will have updated recommendations, cafes, bakeries, dessert places, and some restaurants from out of town.

Why is SF’s food scene not the best in the country?

First, I thought I should address the big question: Why isn’t San Francisco’s food scene better than it is? I’ve already gone on record saying that NYC and LA are better (though the difference isn’t huge). Why?

There’s one obvious, overriding reason: city size. San Francisco is a city of 826,000 people; New York City has 8.58 million, while LA has 3.87 million. So if the number of restaurants is generally proportional to the number of people, then even if quality were equivalent, we’d expect NYC to have more than ten times as many good restaurants as SF, and LA to have more than four times as many.

This would lead very naturally to people thinking SF has a worse food scene than those much larger cities. The restaurants we go to are not a random sample; we try to pick the ones we’ll like the most. So if you can find 10 times as many restaurants you like in NYC, you might end up thinking restaurants in NYC are better on average, even if they’re not. (Also, larger populations mean NYC and LA have more partisans to stand up for their hometowns in online arguments.)

The people who bash San Francisco restaurants are often quick to explain that there’s plenty of great food in the rest of the Bay Area — in the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley, etc.), the Peninsula (South SF, Daly City, Redwood City, Mountain View), and in the South Bay (Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose). And this is very true. But keep in mind that the Bay Area has a total of nine million people — a little bit more than New York City. I would gladly pit the entire SF Bay Area against all of NYC in terms of food.

OK, but San Francisco is by far the densest part of the Bay Area, in terms of population per square mile. Why isn’t it considered the center of the metro area’s culinary scene, the way Manhattan is for NYC? Why do people tell you to go to the South Bay or the East Bay if you want to eat well?

I think there are several reasons for this. The first is simply the insane rent. SF is one of the least affordable cities in the country, thanks to the AI boom, the tech industry in general, draconian restrictions on housing development, the unique and excellent weather,3 and the fact that it’s destined by geography to be the dense core of a major metro area. On top of that, San Francisco is one of the hardest places to start a small business, thanks to decades of red tape accumulated under supposedly “progressive” governance.

That means if you’re going to start a restaurant in San Francisco, you are probably going to have to charge a lot of money to make up for all the money and time you had to spend. The exceptions are restaurateurs who own their own buildings, who have long-term legacy leases, or who have owners who rent to them for below market rates. This means that SF food tends to be a sort of double-peaked distribution, with $600-a-person places like Benu and cheap banh mi places like L&G, but not a lot of mid-price places.

So if you’re a penniless 22-year-old tech founder living in a bunk bed in a grungy group house, or if you’re a 44-year-old tech founder who pocketed $80 million from selling his company to Amazon and now just “invests”, you’re more likely to be satisfied with the SF food scene. But if you’re a 30-year-old who makes $200,000 working for a big tech company, there are going to be fewer of the kind of mid-priced options that you could afford but which would also give you a special night out.

SF’s stratospheric rent also probably exerts a more subtle corrosive influence on the food scene. The middle class has largely been priced out of the city, leaving it to the rich and the rent-controlled. That has largely hollowed out the kind of middle-class ethnic communities that patronize the great ethnic food scenes of Los Angeles, as well as the bohemian hipsters and artists who seek out the most creative affordable eating options.

Everybody knows about SF’s rent problem, but I think one more factor that tends to fly under the radar is limited competition due to geographic immobility. New York has a great train system, making it pretty easy to get anywhere in the central city on foot. LA and all other American cities (including Oakland and San Jose) are driving towns, where you can often get very quickly from point to point. But San Francisco does not have a good intra-city train network (sorry, Muni!), nor is it car-friendly. You can Uber, but that gets expensive if you do it a lot. So in my experience, a lot of San Franciscans often end up just staying in their neighborhoods.

When people stay in their neighborhoods, restaurants aren’t competing with each other nearly as much; everyone just goes to their local spots. This reduces the incentive for restaurants to innovate, raise their quality, and differentiate themselves — there’s just not as much chance to attract patrons from across town. Each restaurant instead just serves up its classic fare to the standard crowd of locals, and they have to accept whatever they’re given. And when you ask people for recommendations, you just get their standard neighborhood spots (or a recitation of the Michelin Guide).

So if you want to make San Francisco’s food scene better, my suggestions would be:

1. Build a lot more housing

2. Make the Muni a lot faster and improve its coverage of the city

3. Cut red tape and make it a lot easier to start a small business

4. Allow and encourage multi-level retail

But having said all that, I do think that San Francisco’s restaurant scene is decently good despite all of these challenges. So here are some recommendations of places to go.

Three types of restaurants I tend to like in San Francisco

There are good examples of practically every type of restaurant in San Francisco. But I’ve noticed three distinct types that I think SF does particularly well.

Type 1: Pseudo-izakayas

An izakaya is a type of Japanese restaurant, similar to a tapas bar. You typically order a variety of small plates and share them among a group of people, often while drinking. Traditionally, izakayas mostly served old Japanese standby dishes — karaage, basic yakitori and sushi, that sort of thing. But around the 1990s, a bunch of izakayas started getting more experimental and creative. The small-plate format allowed them to do this, because it let diners order one weird new thing among a bunch of old favorites. This trend accelerated as the Japanese government lowered trade barriers and allowed more cheap imports of foreign ingredients. By the 2010s, most of the best restaurants in Japan were izakayas rather than omakase, ramen, etc.

San Francisco doesn’t have many (well, really, any) of these new, upscale, creative izakayas. But it has a number of restaurants that basically do this same format with some other type of cuisine — Middle Eastern, or Mexican, etc. The small-plate format allows these restaurants to charge a little more — they’ll usually run about $70 to $110 per person — but they compensate for this by giving diners enormous variety and experimenting with lots of new dishes.

These places sometimes get described as “fusion”, but their dishes aren’t mashups — instead, they start from a base of a specific type of cuisine and then play around with it, throwing in a couple of ingredients from other cuisines. In fact, one good way to identify good restaurants in the U.S. these days is to look for places that use one or two Japanese and Korean ingredients in dishes that aren’t Japanese or Korean.

By the way, one of my most important tips for eating out is: ALWAYS EAT FAMILY STYLE. That means share everything, unless you have someone with special dietary restrictions with you. Sharing everything means you get to try a lot more dishes, which is especially important at the kind of izakaya-style places I talk about in this section. It also means you get to constantly cleanse your palate — when you go back and forth between a bunch of different dishes, you keep recapturing some of the novelty of each dish every time you come back to it. Whereas if you just order your own thing and chow down on that one thing, you hit the law of diminishing utility.

Anyway, here are some places I like that fit this description:

Maria Isabel: Officially a Mexican restaurant, but really they play around and mix in a bunch of different ingredients from a bunch of different cuisines. Every single thing I had here was excellent, and this might be the best new restaurant I’ve discovered this year. The plates are small, so order a lot; it’s only a little expensive. They also have a tasting menu, so technically they’re also in the “hipster fine dining” category. They’re probably going to get a Michelin star and jack up their prices, so go soon.

Prik Hom: In terms of sheer deliciousness, this is my favorite Thai restaurant in a city with lots of good Thai restaurants (though it’s more expensive than the close runner-up, Khao Tiew). The dishes are experimental riffs on standard Thai favorites, and the menu rotates frequently, but everything is delicious so don’t worry you’ll order the wrong thing. (Make sure to eat the ice cream at the end, though.) Prik Hom is a hidden gem for now — it’s in a neighborhood without a lot of other restaurants, and you can often just walk in.

Aziza: Everyone knows about this place, and it’s as good as they say. I’d say it’s tied with Dalida for my favorite Middle Eastern food in the city. But it’s not traditional Middle Eastern — I had one of the best octopus dishes I’ve ever eaten at Aziza, which is saying something because I lived in Japan. The menu rotates frequently, but you can always get the “trio of spreads” to start. There’s also a tasting menu, so this fits in the “hipster fine dining” category too.

Dalida: The other great Middle Eastern izakaya I know in SF. This is Maria Isabel’s sister restaurant (the chefs at the two places are spouses), and it’s comparable in quality. Dalida is also one of those rare restaurants that’s good for brunch and dinner, so try both (and if you go for brunch, sit outside). Dalida doesn’t include as many ingredients from other cuisines as Aziza does, but everything is a little experimental and unusual anyway. There is also a tasting menu for dinner.

Bansang: I’m kind of mad at Bansang, because it replaced what was by far my favorite Japanese izakaya in San Francisco, Izakaya Kou. But I forgive the owners, because they replaced Kou with one of the only really excellent Korean restaurants in San Francisco. Like the other “pseudo-izakayas” on this list, Bansang focuses on smallish plates with original twists on old Korean favorites (chimichurri in the galbi, etc.), and they frequently rotate their menu.

Pearl 6101: You don’t see a lot of experimentation with Italian food, but Pearl is the best example of an “Italian izakaya” I’ve been to in SF. They don’t use as many Asian or Middle Eastern ingredients as some of the other restaurants on this list, but they’ll sneak a little Vietnamese fish sauce into their halibut crudo. Everything is very well-executed.

Horsefeather: A restaurant disguised as a bar. This is one of the best-kept secrets in San Francisco, since most people think it’s just a place to drink, but it actually has a very extensive food menu full of creative and excellent cuisine that’s basically a mashup of French, Latin American, Korean, Japanese, and Italian. I had some of the best asparagus of my life here, and an unbelievable tres leches cake — both of which have now been taken off the menu, because it rotates frequently. A great place for large parties on short notice. Horsefeather is also co-owned by Hanson Li, one of SF’s most creative and interesting restaurateurs.

Fermentation Lab: The single most underrated, unknown restaurant in this category. It’s another restaurant disguised as a bar, like Horsefeather. Fermentation Lab is basically a Korean izakaya, serving creative Korean twists like makegeolli-braised pork belly in addition to standard bar bites like duck fat fries. Everything is delicious and original. I cannot stress how bad the marketing of this restaurant has been, relative to its quality — people ought to be snapping up reservations weeks in advance, but instead there are open seats and you can just walk in. People don’t even seem to know it’s Korean!

Tiya: An Indian izakaya with some Japanese influences. If you want to get wagyu stir-fried with asparagus, madras curry, and quinoa, or octopus curry with smoked tomato pachadi and kumquat, this is the place to get it. It’s very experimental, so if your Indian friends are looking for a taste of home, consider taking them to Copra instead. But Tiya has stuff you won’t get anywhere else, and it’s easily my favorite restaurant in the Marina. It’s also open for brunch, and it has a tasting menu option for dinner, though I haven’t tried either of those.

Rich Table: “New American” is a term that sometimes describes overpriced faux-French places, and sometimes describes extremely creative izakaya-type places that blend traditional American fare with ingredients from Japan, Korea, and other countries in Asia. Rich Table is probably the best of these in the city, unless you count the Michelin-star places — and on “yums per dollar”, it beats most of those places hands down. In fact, Rich Table is probably the closest thing you can get in SF to a good modern/experimental Japanese izakaya — the two cuisines are basically converging. It also has a tasting menu.

Other great examples:

Routier (probably my favorite French restaurant in town, everything tastes interesting and a bit unusual, but almost always better than the standard version4)

Ernest (another “New American” place with lots of contributions from other cuisines, a bit like Rich Table; get the cheesecake)

The Morris (yet another great New American place, I recommend the crudite)

Four Kings (a Cantonese izakaya, everything very solid but could stand to be a little more experimental, I recommend the squab)

Happy Crane (another Cantonese izakaya, very new and experimental, still working out some kinks and can be hit or miss, but the hits are excellent)

Jilli (another Korean bar-style restaurant, the menu is much smaller than the others but everything is excellent and the flavors are extremely original; try the kimchi vodka rigatoni pasta with burrata)

Red Window (warning: order only the Spanish dishes, not the Italian ones!)

Phonobar (a vegan izakaya masquerading as a bar)

Type 2: Hipster fine dining

Most “fine dining” places in SF range from $200 to $600 per person, and come complete with Michelin stars and vigorous arguments over whether they’re “the best meal I’ve ever had” or “totally overrated”. But there are a few places you can go that offer a “fine dining” experience for a much more affordable price — usually around $90-$120 per person, but occasionally as low as $50.

There is some overlap with the “pseudo-izakaya” category here, because many of those places offer tasting menus. Rich Table, Maria Isabel, Aziza, Dalida, Ernest, and Happy Crane all count as “hipster fine dining” too. But here are a few others:

Mijoté: This might just be my favorite restaurant in the city. It’s officially a French restaurant — the “j” is pronounced like a “j”, not like an “h” — but it has very heavy Japanese influences. That’s probably because the chef, Kosuke Tada, is a Japanese guy who worked in France for a long time. Everything at Mijote is excellent; it’s only a prix fixe menu, and it changes frequently, but I’ve never once been disappointed with anything. Kosuke is a virtuoso; one time he catered deli sandwiches for a random party I went to in Oakland, and they were some of the best sandwiches I’ve ever had. And the price is very affordable as fine dining goes — just $84 per person.

7 Adams: This place does have one Michelin star (and richly deserves it), but it’s significantly cheaper than a lot of other Michelin places while being every bit as good. It’s “New American”, with somewhat fewer Asian ingredients than Rich Table.

Mr. Pollo: Still among the best-kept secrets in SF, even though it’s been around for many years. Two guys took over a space from a Colombian restaurant called Mr. Pollo, but kept the sign and the name. It’s not Colombian food (they used to do arepas every night, but stopped); it’s just whatever they feel like cooking this week. It’s always good, and it’s just $49 — maybe the best value for money in the entire city. Good luck getting a reservation, though.

Type 3: New hole in the wall

There are a number of cheap-ish restaurants that luckily manage to avoid the curse of SF’s astronomical rent. Most of these have just been sitting in the same spot since the 80s or 90s, and haven’t really updated their cuisines. However, there are some new ones that manage to open up, and some of these — through some mystical combination of skill, dedication, luck, or whatever — manage to be truly excellent. Here are a few examples:

Sichuan Tasty Restaurant: One of the most underrated restaurants in the city. I love Sichuan food, and though I tell myself I’ve been to one or two places in Flushing that were better than Sichuan Tasty Restaurant, I can’t quite remember if they really were better. Everything is delicious, the portions are huge, and somehow there are always seats open and you can just walk in. Remember to order everything with extra 花椒.

Mini Potstickers: If you want great takeout dumplings in SF, this, in my opinion, is one of the two best places to get them. The boiled dumplings are as good as the nearby (and much more famous) Yuanbao Jiaozi, but Mini Potstickers has much more range — awesome mini fried dumplings (hence the name), and excellent jianbing.

Fuwa Dumpling: SF’s other great takeout dumpling place, also with good variety. Probably the best takeout boiled dumplings I’ve had in the city.

Gusto Pinsa Romana: Some restaurants have started aggressively marketing traditional Roman-style pizza as “pinsa”, and defined it as a whole new category of food. Well, more power to them. Of “pinsa” restaurants in SF, Pinsa Rossa is the most famous, but Gusto Pinsa Romana is — at least in my opinion — far and away the best. It’s cheap, it’s delicious, and it’s good to eat in or DoorDash.

Timur: As of this writing, Timur Indian and Nepalese Cuisine has a perfect 5.0 rating on Google with 688 reviews. That’s just incredible. It’s well-deserved — this small, out-of-the-way, affordable little restaurant is the best Nepalese food in a city filled with great Nepalese places. I especially recommend the korma.

Sherpa House: This one just barely gets edged out by Timur for “best Nepalese in town”, but honestly it’s very very close. Also a perfect 5.0 on Google as of this writing, with 202 reviews.

Bo&Beurre: How would you like a huge, incredibly delicious banh mi sandwich in the middle of downtown San Francisco for only $6? Bo&Beurre is a little out-of-the-way Vietnamese place that will give you that sandwich. Somehow it’s much less well known than Saigon Sandwich, which is less than a block away and has lines down the street, but which is definitely not as good.

L&G: The other amazing super-cheap banh mi place in SF’s Little Saigon neighborhood is L&G — and it’s right next to Bo&Beurre. Actually, the two places are somewhat different — Bo’s sandwiches are drier and perfectly arranged, while L&G’s are a greasy street-food sauce-bomb. Both are amazing, both have no lines, and I’d recommend both over Saigon Sandwich.

Oodle Yunnan Rice Noodle: I am always looking for Chinese restaurants that are neither Cantonese, Sichuan, nor dumplings. This one fit the bill nicely. The food is delicious, the prices are affordable, the decor and ambiance are very cheerful and modern, the staff is super friendly, and you can just walk in.

El Gallo Giro Food Truck: I’m sort of stretching the boundaries of this category to include a food truck that has been parked in the Mission for over two decades, but it would be criminal not to. This little truck has some of the best tacos and burritos in the city. I don’t know how they do it so well. You need to pay with cash or Venmo, so be prepared.

Anyway, there’s a sampling of my three favorite types of restaurants in San Francisco. But there are a bunch more good ones, so let’s go through some of the standard categories.

Cuisine-specific recommendations

Japanese

I spent a lot of time raving about how great izakayas were, but ever since Izakaya Kou closed, there aren’t really any great ones in San Francisco. Kibatsu in Lower Haight and Fenikkusu in the Mission are the closest — both are very solid, but they ought to get more creative and update their menus more. Kibatsu has to be my favorite here, because they also have some great nigiri, including an umimasu that’s the best I’ve ever had.5 Noren also has good quality yakitori.

However, there are a number of very good Japanese restaurants of other, more standard types. Two ramen places — Taishoken and Mensho SF — really dominate the scene here; both have skilled Japanese chefs, and are similar in quality to what you’d get at very good ramen restaurants in Tokyo. I’d give the edge to Taishoken, since it takes reservations and doesn’t require you to wait an hour on the street in the middle of SF’s worst neighborhood like Mensho does.

There’s a kaitenzushi place called Izumi in Japantown mall that’s actually as good as any I’ve had in Japan (though much more expensive). Nabe is a Japanese hot pot place in the Sunset that also matches Japanese quality. There are also some “big roll” sushi places of the type you can’t get in Japan — my favorite ones like Arashi Sushi closed in the pandemic, but DJ Sushi’s big rolls are criminally underrated and there are a bunch of new ones I haven’t tried yet. Potto and Shabu Club are also solid hot pot places with good-quality meat.

Omakase is difficult, because America has trouble getting fresh fish — both because of stricter health laws, and because of geographic distance from Japanese supply chains — and most of the famous places are just way overpriced. But there are a couple very solid ones, including Doma Sushi in Bernal, and Robin in Hayes Valley. Robin is a controversial pick here, because it’s non-traditional and experimental, but their experiments hit a lot more often than they miss, and if you’re in a country that has trouble getting fresh fish, experimentation is more important. An is also good, though for some reason it takes 3 hours to eat.

Vietnamese

San Francisco has a lot of great cheap Vietnamese food, especially in the “Little Saigon” area near the Tenderloin. I’ve already mentioned Bo&Beurre and L&G, but also check out Pho Tan Hoa and Larkin Restaurant for pho. Pho 2000 isn’t my favorite for Pho, ironically, but has very good appetizers and other dishes. But the best Vietnamese restaurant in the whole area is probably the amazing Hai Ky Mi Gia, a little Chinese-Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall that serves some of the best seafood egg noodles I’ve ever had. There are also plenty of good cheap and cheap-ish places scattered throughout the city, like Banh Mi Crunch in the Sunset, An Chi in the Richmond, and others.

As for upscale Vietnamese, that’s harder to find, partly because “upscale Vietnamese” is just a thing that not a lot of people try yet. My favorite is definitely Gao Viet in the Sunset, which serves absolutely huge portions of absolutely delicious food, including both traditional favorites like banh xeo and some truly wacky giant combos of stuff. Thanh Long makes a good crab, though it’s a little bit overpriced. Bodega SF is pretty good, though a bit uneven. There is also a place called Hem by LeQuy in the Mission that does traditional stuff, but slightly more expensive and higher-quality than most; it probably has the single best bowl of pho I’ve eaten in SF. Note that I still have a lot of Vietnamese places left to try in this city.

Nepalese

I’m not sure why, but there has been an explosion of good Nepalese places in San Francisco in recent years — most of them pretty affordable. Tyler Cowen has a rule that you should try the less-well-known ethnic cuisines, and that definitely applies to Nepalese in SF; the Nepalese places here tend to be much better than the similar Indian places. The three best I’ve found are the aforementioned Timur and Sherpa House, plus a third place called Base Camp that does excellent lunch and focuses more on noodle dishes than curries. But there are a lot of other very good ones, including Himalayan Cuisine, Dancing Yak, Nepa Indian Cuisine, and others.

Thai

For some reason, San Francisco has a lot of very good Thai restaurants. Unlike Vietnamese places, which tend to be cheap, Thai places tend to be mid-priced or even a little upscale. So they make good spots for date nights or big group outings.

The yummiest Thai place I’ve been to is the aforementioned Prik Hom, but in terms of yums per dollar, it — and every other Thai place — is absolutely mogged6 by Khao Tiew in West Portal. You can absolutely gorge yourself sick on amazing food at Khao Tiew for $30. But the downside is that the place doesn’t take reservations, so you have to wait two or three hours in line just to get in.7

Nor are those the only great places in town. Ka Kai in the Castro has an amazing sampler platter, and the best khao soi I’ve ever eaten. Nari has an absolutely incredible trout curry — probably the best Thai curry I’ve ever had — and is more affordable than Google says it is.8 There are a number of other solid ones as well.

Mexican

People from Los Angeles love to talk trash about how their Mexican food is so much better than San Francisco’s Mexican food. It isn’t. The taquerias in the Mission are as good as what you’ll get in LA, and the “Mission burrito” is a genuine local specialty.

What is the best Mission burrito in SF? This is a long-running debate, but my favorites are Taqueria Buen Sabor, El Metate, the venerable El Farolito, and the aforementioned El Gallo Giro Food Truck.9

As for tacos, for my top picks I of course recommend El Gallo Giro, and a nearby place called Taqueria Vallarta. Taqueria Los Altos is very good as well. There’s also a place called El Rey Taquiza Artesanal that’s excellent, though more expensive.

SF also has some good upscale Mexican places, especially the brilliant Maria Isabel and the delicious brunch spot el Mil Amores. There are a lot I haven’t been to yet, so I’ll report on those in Part 2. (SF also has the country’s only 3-Michelin-star Mexican place, Californios, though I haven’t been.)

New American

I’ve already covered most of my favorite New American places — Horsefeather, Rich Table, 7 Adams, Ernest, and The Morris. Another place I like a lot is Verjus, and side a can be a little uneven but has one of the best salads I’ve ever eaten (the Garbage Salad). Golden Eye Social and Plow are solid too, though Plow makes you stand in line. The chicken and fries at Zuni Cafe are as good as everyone says, so that’s worth a visit.

Italian

Like NYC and many other American cities, San Francisco has a lot of “red sauce” Italian places — traditional Sicilian-type places where you can get lasagna and spaghetti and infinite free bread. Those have never really been my thing, but I do have to say that Sotto Mare’s famous cioppino is really very good.10

But there are also some good mid-priced Italian places in town. Everyone says Cotogna is the best of these, and they’re correct; they had a corn pasta recently that’s the best pasta I’ve ever eaten. Seven Hills gets a lot of grief for being old-fashioned, but the quality is as good as what I’ve had in NYC, for a significantly more affordable price. Flour + Water is also quite solid, though I’d get the pasta instead of the pizza. Pearl 6101 is the most creative.

I’m not sure if pizza counts as Italian food at this point, but SF does have great pizza. Little Star is my favorite, with Chicago-quality deep dish and excellent Detroit-style pizza as well. Outta Sight is probably the best place to order for parties. Gusto Pinsa Romana is delicious, unusual, and surprisingly healthy. I also like Sforno a lot.

SF can’t hold its own against NYC (or Japan) in terms of Italian food, but it’s not hard to find good stuff here.

Chinese

Chinese food is undoubtedly San Francisco’s biggest culinary failing. Given the huge ethnic community — almost a quarter of the city’s population is of Chinese descent! — it should have a ton of great Chinese restaurants. Instead, it has endless mediocre Cantonese banquet places that look like they haven’t changed a thing (including their signage and decor) since 1982. When regular people (as opposed to snobby NYC chefs) say “food in SF sucks”, they often mean that the Chinese food sucks.

It does not all suck. There are some solid high-end places — Four Kings and Happy Crane are good “pseudo-izakaya” style places. Mister Jiu’s and Empress by Boon are solid Cantonese banquet places that aren’t stuck in 1982. There are also a few great hole-in-the-wall places, like Sichuan Tasty Restaurant, Oodle Yunnan Rice Noodle, Mini Potstickers, Fuwa Dumpling, and Hai Ky Mi Gia.

But these are few and far between. And in terms of mid-price restaurants — the kind you’d be blown away by in Milpitas, Cupertino, or Daly City — there really just aren’t that many. Dumpling House in the Castro is a sleeper hit in my opinion, with the best green beans I’ve ever had, plus all-around great dumplings. Tasty Pot is a great individualized Taiwanese hot pot place, though some people (mistakenly) look down on it. There are a few solid hotpot places like IPOT, and a few solid dim sum places like Dragon Beaux and Palette Tea House. Z&Y is OK, I suppose. But honestly, it’s slim pickings, and if you want good Chinese food I’d usually just recommend taking a trip across the Bay Bridge or down to the south suburbs, which IMO rival Greater Los Angeles and surpass NYC in quality.

Others

There’s lots of other good stuff in San Francisco. SF has some great lunch sandwich places — the best is Tarragon Cafe, which is one of the city’s best-kept secrets, and where everything is delicious (I recommend ordering the salmon toast with avocado). Tartine Manufactory is great too. For Greek food, go to Kokkari for the higher end and The Parthenon for the lower end. For German, go to Suppenküche in Hayes. For brunch, Plain Jane and its sister restaurant Mymy are hard to beat, though there are lots of great places like Les Marais and Sweet Maple. Beit Rima is another solid Middle Eastern place. For pubs, I like Hazie’s and Stoa. Hook Fish has excellent fish sandwiches and such. Burma Love and its sister restaurant Teakwood are both yummy (get the duck curry at Teakwood).11 Brenda’s does have good cajun and soul food. For vegan food, I really love both Phonobar (which is basically a vegan izakaya), and Shizen, the vegan sushi spot. House of Prime Rib deserves its status as a local favorite, though it’s a LOT of food. JouJou is a solid (if a little uneven) new French spot. Piglet & Co. is a Taiwanese izakaya-style place that serves a lot of interesting pork dishes. Niku is an excellent steakhouse with great side dishes and a butcher shop next door that does great wagyu burgers.

I think that just about does it for my specific recommendations. That’s probably enough restaurants to keep you eating well for a couple of years!

Overrated restaurants?

When I give my recommendations, one thing some people ask me is to identify some restaurants that I think are overrated — they want to be warned away from bad restaurants, not just pointed toward good ones!

That’s a reasonable thing to want, but in general I’m kind of against this. As I said, tastes differ a lot — if you like a restaurant I don’t like, then good for you and good for the restaurant too! I don’t expect my preferences to be universally shared, and I certainly don’t regard them as the voice of authority.

But that said, knowing what I don’t like might help you to understand whether and how your preferences match or diverge from my own. Just remember that I’m not criticizing anyone for liking things I don’t like.

First, there are some restaurants I just really did not like at all. These include Lily, a Vietnamese place in the Richmond; La Ciccia, an Italian place in Bernal; and Bir Kitchen, a Nepalese place in the Mission. For whatever reason, the food at these places just really did not appeal to me. If it appeals to you, more power to you.

Second, there are a bunch of restaurants that form a sort of “standard canon” of what people in the tech scene — i.e., my own social scene — tend to recommend, but which I think are no better than similar places that receive much less attention. One of these is La Taqueria, which serves fine burritos but which in my opinion doesn’t justify the massive line around the block — especially when you have El Metate and El Gallo Giro so close by. Saigon Sandwich is the same thing for banh mi — Bo&Beurre and L&G are literally across the street with no line. I don’t understand why people form a massive line for pizza at Jules or dumplings at Dumpling Home, when Gioia and Dumpling House are similarly good and just a few minutes’ walk away.

Most of all, I can’t understand why everyone always wants to go to Izakaya Rintaro. I’ve been there five or six times now, but you can get pretty much the same sort of mid-level 1990s-era izakaya food at Nande-ya in Japantown, or Izakaya Sozai in the Sunset, or a number of other places — and honestly better, if you go to The Public Izakaya or Chome.

I once heard someone say “the line is the product,” and I guess maybe that’s right. Perhaps there is some level of endogenous coordination, where the fact that everyone else is excited for a particular place makes it more exciting to go there, even when it’s not very different from other places.

Anyway.

Neighborhoods

That about sums it up for my recommendations, but as I said, I’ve been to only 10% of the restaurants in San Francisco. If you want to come to SF and wander around and find places that you didn’t hear about in this guide, or the Michelin Guide, or on the standard “where to eat” websites, where do you go? I thought it would be good to offer some general thoughts on the various neighborhoods in the city.

The Mission: The Mission is, far and away, the best eating neighborhood in San Francisco. This is partly a function of size, since it’s larger than other centrally located neighborhoods. But it’s also very central, and it’s a place that lots of people come to hang out and drink and shop and party. That means it’s a little less burdened by SF’s geographic immobility — a lot of people are always in the Mission, and so restaurants are forced to compete for their business. That’s why the Mission has lots of good top-end places like Mijote, Flour + Water, Ernest, The Morris, Shizen, and so on, along with great mid-price offerings like Little Star, Base Camp, and Taishoken.

But the Mission also has a thriving Mexican community and lots of buildings with preferential rent arrangements or legacy leases, which is why you get lots of good cheap Mexican places too. Basically, if you walk around in the Mission, you’re going to find a lot of good stuff.

Japantown: Japantown has a lot of OK legacy Japanese places — izakayas and noodle spots and yakitori places that are still basically the same as they were in the 90s. Those are fine, I suppose. But the high level of foot traffic opens up room for a lot of genuinely great spots to open. It’s the city’s center for Korean food, with Bansang, Fermentation Lab, and Daeho Kalbijim, as well as a good Korean-run katsu spot called Ganji.

North Beach: Again, I recommend not going here for the standard local thing (red-sauce Italian). There are a lot of other random good places here, drawn by the heavy foot traffic — Noren for yakitori, Tasty Pot for hotpot, Red Window for tapas, Verjus for New American, and so on.

The Central/Outer Richmond: Probably the best place in the city to find good hole-in-the-wall spots, especially Chinese ones. I need to try a lot more places (and will report back in Part II).

The Sunset: Another good place to go hunting for hole-in-the-wall and mid-price spots. It’s very diverse in terms of cuisine. Both the Inner and Central Sunset are good.

Hayes Valley: My own neighborhood! It has a reputation for being full of yuppies, which is honestly pretty deserved, but it turns out that yuppies want to eat at good restaurants too. The good places here tend to be mid-priced spots like Teakwood, Phonobar, Hazie’s, Dumpling Home, and so on, making it one of the few neighborhoods in SF where you can consistently eat well for $40 a person.

Russian Hill/Polk St.: I haven’t been to enough places here, but it’s probably the best neighborhood for Italian food in the city. It also has a few Nepalese spots toward the south end of the neighborhood.

The Tenderloin: If you’re willing to brave the drug-induced disorder of the Loin, you can eat some extremely good cheap Vietnamese food in Little Saigon.

The Inner Richmond: This is a surprisingly overrated neighborhood. There are tons of restaurants, many with great reputations, but very few ones I’d put at the top of my list. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s central enough to have high rents, but peripheral enough not to have the heavy foot traffic that lures good places to the Mission, Japantown, Hayes, and North Beach.

Chinatown: Chinatown is mostly dominated by incredibly mediocre antiquated places that are still hanging on to their ancient cheap leases. There are a few good (expensive) Chinese places here, and a few good little bakeries like Yummy Bakery on Jackson, but in general this is SF’s most disappointing eating neighborhood.

The Embarcadero/FiDi: This is the neighborhood I’ve eaten in least, and I plan to review it in greater detail in Part 2. There are some solid famous places along the waterfront — Angler, Hog Island, La Mar, and so on. Kokkari is great. But overall I haven’t eaten here much.

SoMa: San Francisco’s great food desert. It was once the center of SF’s bustling daytime office culture, meaning that most of the restaurants were either lunch takeaway spots or happy hour bars. Then Covid hit, and everyone left downtown, and the takeaway spots and happy hour bars closed down. Now workers are slowly coming back to the area, but it’ll take a while for the neighborhood restaurant scene to recover, and there are only a couple of good places left.

Others: West Portal/Stonestown/Parkside, Dogpatch, Potrero, the Design District, and the Wharf area all have a few good spots, but aren’t really places to walk around and discover good new places. The Castro is OK, and is slowly getting some good new spots like Ka Kai and Potto. Noe Valley is surprisingly sparse, given the number of aging yuppies and well-to-do young families who live there. I haven’t been to Bernal enough. The Marina is dominated by bars, being more of a place to drink than a place to eat.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say so far about eating out in San Francisco. In about a year, I’ll circle back with Part 2! Happy munching!

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2026-08-16 15:26:51

Zhu Rongji has passed away at the age of 97. He was not the only architect of the economic reforms that have made China a modern powerhouse — Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and others were all important — but Zhu was perhaps the most skilled, versatile, and far-sighted. He presided over China’s greatest era of reform and opening up — 1991 to 2003 — and handled both macroeconomic and microeconomic policy with a skill that perhaps no other Chinese leader has ever matched.

In many ways, Zhu was the man who really made China a capitalist country. The privatization of state-owned enterprises had begun earlier, but Zhu continued and accelerated it. He was the main champion of China’s successful drive to join the WTO, which supercharged China’s export industries and led to a massive wave of foreign investment; he also engaged in a deregulation program to lure foreign businesses to manufacture things in China.

When the Asian financial crisis of 1997 led to a wave of bad loans, Zhu bailed out the banks, and growth quickly resumed. And Zhu also devised the most important tax reform in China’s modern history, transferring large amounts of local government revenue to the central government, while simultaneously letting local governments do things like borrow more money and sell more leases on land to fund their own activities.

There is no question in my mind that Zhu ought to be remembered as one of history’s great heroes. When he entered office, East Asia had 1.22 billion people living on less than $3 a day (in 2021 dollars) — more than half the world’s total. By the time Xi Jinping became China’s top leader, that number was one-sixth of what it had been:

This is the biggest and fastest decrease in absolute poverty that the human race has ever seen. Zhu didn’t do it alone, of course, but the economic model he devised was so effective at generating rapid growth that he deserves more credit than perhaps any individual other than Deng Xiaoping. The list of people who have done more to decrease aggregate human suffering is short indeed.

China is no longer the growth powerhouse it was in those earlier years. According to official statistics, over the last 15 years, China’s growth rate has fallen to 5% — less than half of what it was in Zhu’s time:

Some independent estimates put the growth rate much lower — maybe 2-3%. China is going through a difficult economic time right now, and its leaders have a tradition of “smoothing” official numbers by understating growth during booms and overstating it during busts.

Some amount of slowdown is to be expected. China is a much richer country than it was when Zhu left office — maybe five times richer. When Zhu ended his historic tenure in 2003, China was about as rich as Tanzania or Zambia is now. Today, it’s closer to Argentina or the Dominican Republic. A country can’t keep growing at supercharged rates forever; eventually, technological catch-up and capital deepening run their course, and a country is forced to grow based more on innovation and improved efficiency.

To be fair, Xi Jinping has taken some serious steps toward making that transition. His government has designed a “new national system” of research and development that tries to coordinate the entire supply chain of innovation, all the way from government-funded research labs to private companies putting products on the shelves. He has unleashed the most expensive and extensive system of industrial subsidies in world history, promoting essentially every advanced manufacturing industry in existence, as well as AI. These policies may be unorthodox, but their goal is the right one — they’re aimed at pushing China past middle-income status by replacing catch-up growth with frontier innovation.

Whether Xi’s policies have been effective at this goal is less clear. There’s actually a big debate over whether Chinese total factor productivity — a measure of overall economic efficiency — grew in the 2010s. The Penn World Tables, which had until recently shown a severe slowdown in TFP growth, recently changed their assumptions and now report very healthy annualized growth of over 2% throughout the 2010s. Other sources, such as the Conference Board and Brandt et al. (2022), still think there was a slowdown, and peg the rate at around 1%. But everyone agrees that China’s TFP growth has been slowing over time, and that Xi’s “industrial policy for everything” hasn’t managed to re-accelerate it so far.1

In fact, a lot of people are noting that China now appears to have a “two-speed” or “k-shaped” economy — split between a high-tech manufacturing sector that’s increasingly the envy of the world, and a broader economy that’s still mired in the aftermath of the country’s epic real estate bust.

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