“Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.”
Well, maybe not.
There was a time when you could get a hotel room in Las Vegas for five bucks and even adjusted for inflation that would be about $40 dollars today.
Of course, there have always been “whale” penthouses and suites, but the lumpen gambler – if they played their cards right – could “Do Vegas” cheaper than any other tourist mecca would cost.
No kids of course, but that was kinda the point then – everything that happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas, except maybe for accidental child support and/or a bout with chlamydia.
Then larger developers had a thought – what if you actually started charging people rates for food and rooms that were closer to what they would pay in any other large city, any other destination?
So the room rates went up, then the food, then the rooms again, then the things for kids to do were added, then the fancy shops were added, then the rooms went up again and what had been a loss leader intended to get people to gamble turned into a profit center.
And the room rates kept rising and then it stopped and they came back down a skoosh.
Why?
Because the casino owners had a limit as to what they could charge rooms that would not significantly lessen the gambling. In other words, if you charge $100 for a room, people will still spend $1,000 gambling over the weekend – charge $200 and the gambling drops.
And, as Vegas became more expensive for the Average Joe, that’s what happened so the costs were dialed back.
The food and room and booze cost “Y axis” was risen only to the point that the gambling “X axis” did not decline.
Note – it should be remembered that much of this occurred after the mob “left” town – the rooms were cheap because it was difficult (taxes, forms, sales tax receipts that needed to match, etc.) to skim off them when compared to the gambling take. Legit businesses do not really have to worry about that problem so they could raise rates without irking Vinnie “The Wop” DePlante from Cleveland.
The new owners had hit and then set the “Vegas Point” for non-gambling costs.
Has the same now occurred for higher education and government?
Save for serious/problematic gamblers, most people use “extra” or vaca money to gamble – they figure it into the cost of the trip (though, after losing $1,400 in 12 minutes at the craps table, even regular tourists can look longingly at the limitless ATM and think their son really is sorta dumb and really doesn’t need ALL that money in the college fund, now does he…?)
And universities are hitting that same recoil point.
Fewer and fewer people now see the point of paying for a sociology masters, for a philosophy of science degree due to the cost involved and the scattered return on investment – the concept of a pure educations– which is meant to teach a couple of specific things but more importantly to a create “bullshit” detector” about everything else matters and should forever.
It is very true that paying for school – even if you really don’t learn anything which seems to be one of the major issues for kids today – can get you one thing: the ticket into the “credentialed” club and that is extremely valuable.
But the value of that membership seems to be declining as the “socialist statist socialite globalist consultant assistant deputy secretary of historical propriety” club itself has come under fiercer and fierce attack of late.
And with the past decade of diversity rather than raw talent-based admissions and other academic absurdities, the value of the membership itself is declining.
Academia has become the weird old country club that was terribly important and wonderful and powerful decades ago but decided to continue to keep out the whippersnappers and the artists and the Black and the Jews (in many colleges, that is literally and not just figuratively true) and saw itself decline into ratty pointlessness.
Education costs have skyrocketed, leaving inflation ashamed.
