Professor says Las Vegas economy ‘at a crossroad’
UNLV economics professor Mary Riddel remembers growing up in Detroit in the 1960s when it was a bustling and booming city, king of the automobile manufacturing industry.
She went shopping with her family at upscale department stores and everyone seemed to have plenty of money. Household income in Motown easily exceeded the national average.
"We’d laugh at the Japanese cars," Riddel said Wednesday at the annual Southern Nevada Economic Outlook presented by the Center for Business and Economic Research, where she’s been named interim director. "Look how small they are. Who would drive them? They’re low quality. They’re for poor people."
Then the oil crisis struck America in the 1970s, prices skyrocketed and cars lined up at gasoline stations overnight for limited supplies. Suddenly, Japanese cars didn’t look so bad, at least not to people outside of Detroit or Flint, Riddel said.
"Detroit didn’t put it together. This will pass. Americans love their big cars," she said.
Instead of investing in automotive technology, Detroit invested in Washington, D.C., lobbying for huge tariffs on Japanese imports.
Detroit is now one of the cities with the worst urban blight in the United States, Riddel said in her tale of three cities. Detroit, Pittsburgh and Las Vegas all have one thing in common: one-horse economies. Read full story:
