Tourism: Economy of Last Resort

It seems like every time community leaders and government officials talk about the future of the local economy, they talk about tourism as one of its pillars. You hear it about cities and towns of every size, state after state, and even occasionally on the national level.

Around here the economy has always been based on manufacturing (furniture in this part of Michigan, cars in the southeast of the state), but as anyone who follows business news knows, those industries have been heading overseas. For a while they talked a lot about high technology as the source of new jobs, but since the dot-com bubble burst you don't hear quite so much about that.

(Not that they've stopped saying it, of course. Last year when a bunch of plant closings were putting huge numbers of people into the job market, the "experts" kept telling them to get certificate training or 2-year degrees in "high tech"... while, I - a laid off computer specialist with a 4-year-degree and oodles of experience - couldn't even find jobs to apply for. All that advice did was to take some people out of the job market for a little while and put some federal grant money into local schools; those people will be just as unemployed when they're done with school.)

So they keep coming back to tourism. It sounds attractive, because it's all about getting people from other places to come here and spend their money. When it works, it's great for the locals. Tulip Time has been an ongoing annual infusion of cash into Holland, Michigan for decades. Sure, the people who live there have to put up with busloads of (mostly) senior citizens cluttering their streets and sidewalks for a few weeks in May, but the money they spend makes it worthwhile.

But when it fails... it's a complete waste of resources. Back when Flint (the former auto manufacturing city in east Michigan, whose economic collapse was spotlighted in Michael Moore's first big film) was in freefall back in the 1980s, they tried to attract tourism with Autoworld, a big automobile-focused theme park. Disaster with a capital D. No one came.

Even when tourist attractions prove successful, that doesn't mean that they're succeeding as an economic tool. There's an article in today's Grand Rapids Press about who's dominating reservations at Michigan's state parks for the upcoming camping season: us. Michigan is supposed to be a great tourist destination, with hundreds of miles of sandy beaches, inland lakes for fishing, forests for hiking, etc. But instead of drawing Kansans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Indianers, West Virginians, Alabamers, and whatnot to the Great Lakes State to spend their disposable income, we're mostly just passing the same dollars around with our fellow Michiganders. That's no replacement for the money we're not getting from making and selling cars, office furniture, refrigerators, and so on.

If that's how well the tourism economic strategy is working for Michigan - a state that has some natural and obvious reasons for people to come here - imagine how badly it's going to fail in all the places that are trying to make up tourist attractions. More Autoworlds.

Tourism has been a great windfall for various Old World capitals, and for some Third World countries and island-states in the tropics, and it's been good for a few select parts of the United States. But it's not a cure-all for an ailing economy. When everyone's trying to use tourism as a cornerstone of their local business model, you'll just end up with a bunch of hotels that people can't afford to travel to and stay in... because no one's coming to and staying in their hotels. It's kind of like you can't build an all-service economy where everyone's trying to make a living serving food or cleaning houses... and no one can afford to pay them for it. Or an economy based on information and other intangible "products". You need people doing things that are actually productive: growing food, making things, etc.

So unless you live in the Carribean or next to a Disney park, the next time you hear someone discussing local economic strategy, and he starts by talking about tourism... be afraid for your future.