Since my return, I’ve see Roll the Bones in the news twice. First, Chuckmonster at VegasTripping has posted a review of the book. Sure, that sentence doesn’t quite have the cachet of “Edmund Morgan reviewed it in the New York Review of Books,” but it’s good enough for me.
Second, I got the last word in Gary Rivlin’s New York Times piece on Vegas growth that ran today:
“People have been predicting dating back to 1955 that Las Vegas will reach a saturation point,” said David G. Schwartz, author of “Roll the Bones,” a history of gambling, and director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “But me, I wouldn’t bet against casino growth.”
Who wants to bet that, since I sounded so confident there, casino growth begins to stagnate and even decline? Even if it did, I’d stand by what I said, since the historical evidence suggests that, all things being equal, even huge increases in supply haven’t glutted the market, though they weren’t too far off the mark in 1955, when they came pretty close to doing just that. The town survived by repositioning to appeal to business travelers as well.
So if in 2010 casinos discover that they bet wrong, and that the high-end market doesn’t absorb as much room inventory as they project, it won’t be a matter of casinos closing, but simply repositioning themsevles to the customers that are there.