Let's Talk UNLV

0:00:00
Alright, welcome to another segment of the podcast Let's Talk UNRV on KUNV with co-host Keith and Renee. Renee, how was your weekend?

0:00:17
It was really, really chill. I don't have anything to report.

0:00:20
Uh-uh, no, no, no. I'm just, you're telling me that you went somewhere.

0:00:24
I'm serious.

0:00:25
A car wash.

0:00:26
Jumped off a mountain. A car wash.

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That's all that happened.

0:00:29
That's all I got for you.

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Went to the machine,

0:00:32
the shh shh shh shh.

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Okay, little vacuum, little refreshener. That was the excitement of my week. What about you?

0:00:40
Oh, I was birthday parties this weekend.

0:00:42
Oh, wow.

0:00:43
So the 13-year-old, they did a surprise birthday party at the park for one of his friends.

0:00:47
Okay.

0:00:48
But hey, I'm excited. Renee, we have a guest here, we have at least this is an area that I'm less familiar with than Alma Shane because I actually went through the business school for undergrad and grad. So I'm excited to hear from our guest, Andrew Woods, who's the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research to just learn more about that. So Andrew, welcome to the show.

0:01:10
Thank you, Keith.

0:01:11
Happy to be here.

0:01:12
So we want to just maybe throw you a soft question. Just tell us a little bit about how about yourself, your background and how you got to Las Vegas in this position. And then we'll get into the more about the center itself. Sure. Well, it's a long and winding road.

0:01:20
I came to Nevada about 10 years ago to work for the state treasurer. At the time, she recruited me from upstate New York. But before that, I was jumping around. I had worked on Capitol Hill for my home senator back in Washington State, Patty Murray. I had gone to school out in DC and through a variety of different things ended up working more and more in both politics and policy and was recruited by her ten years ago to come out to Nevada. I originally lived in Reno for about two years and then worked on several policy initiatives in the state and then eventually started my own business about four and a half years ago, where I was working for everyone from school board to governor on a variety of issues and very proud of that work and really got into the public policy domain. And when this position opened up, when I it was January of twenty twenty one. So we were a year into this pandemic, which I guess I was just found out it was reminded I think it's either today or tomorrow is the two year anniversary when the WHO officially declared a pandemic. Now that's besides the point of what we're here to talk about. But I just thought it was a reminder anyway how much has changed in the world in the last two years and continues to change. But anyway, so I saw this job and it was just serpendipitous in terms of my background, what I'm passionate about, what I've been working on. You know, I have my master's in economics and public policy from the University of Chicago and really just saw an opportunity in our community coming out of this pandemic of how can we better utilize economics to help our community as we continue to grow and we face a lot of challenges that are applicable to big cities. And I think we're still kind of learning and growing and figuring ourselves out as an identity here in Las Vegas, which is very exciting in one part from a social policy and public policy and economic standpoint. It also, you know, there's also a lot of challenges that come along with that and a lot of just questions of who we are and who we want to be.

0:03:25
Okay, so a lot of big words. Economic research, financial management, African-American studies, you know, education. So I need help here. So break it down. What do these words mean? And specifically, how did you draw some form of passion and a career from your interest in economics and business and politics?

0:03:50
Well, don't be intimidated by the words. Economics likes to use them because it makes us sound smart. But we're really just describing really simple things and behaviors. You know, how I got involved and really passionate about economics, particularly when it comes to urban development, is about six years ago I was riding my bike around Las Vegas because I was training for a 200 mile bike race with my father. And you learn very quickly about how economics isn't just something that's described on paper and we talk about supply and demand, we talk about elasticity of demand or supply or all these different terminologies that you hear in the classroom, it really applies beyond just the book into actually the real world. And you look at how communities are interconnected, say, with how roads are developed and how sidewalks and streets and how that creates gains from trade, because people can go to work, people can go and buy and sell things, say, at a store or a farmer's market, or even today with e-commerce, right, you don't even need to build a road, you just need a connection to the online marketplace. So there is this, it's really important how we build that infrastructure, and that really made me interested in that infrastructure here in Las Vegas because we have a lot of really unique and different neighborhoods, and I've lived in London, I've lived in New York, I've lived in Chicago, D.C., Seattle, but in Vegas, we're not necessarily tied down with thousands of years of history and development. We're a little more newer. So there's a lot of questions of, you know, certainly we've we've grown very quickly. You know, in 1970, we had 300,000 people in the valley. Now we have around two point four million. And we're forecasting another million by 2060. That's out of the Center for Business and Economic Research here at UNLV. So there's a big question of where is that going? What are we doing? And again, just riding around, getting out of the car, walking around, riding your bike, going to parks, talking to the community, you really just see the difference of character in this community and what makes it so unique and diverse. And one light, really interesting and beautiful, but then the other light, you're like, what can we do better? And how do we make it so that we're a little more economically sustainable and I guess you know there's help foster more growth so that we're a little more every time there's an economic shock we're not the worst hit in the nation. So you mentioned

0:06:13
that you lived in several different cities what through your conversations observation or research do you find makes us different or economically more

0:06:23
sustainable than a Chicago or New York a London? Well so I think it's the opposite. I don't think we're economically sustainable at the moment because we are so dependent on one industry, which is travel and leisure. What's very interesting since 1990, so in the last 32 years, that has come less so. So in 1990, 33% of the workforce was employed in travel and leisure gaming hospitality. Today it's 23%. It'll probably bump up to about 24% in about a year just because we're still recovering. We've we've lost a lot of jobs as a result of the pandemic was about 60,000 unemployed, will be fewer jobs today in Clark County than there were pre pandemic. And we've seen growth in these other areas. I think what's really exciting about Las Vegas is that even though we don't talk about economic diversification here, we have a lot of seeds of economic diversification happening. So for example, business services has been our fastest growing sector over the last 30 years, you know, in terms of adding jobs and taking up more and more of the workforce, but so has healthcare. So has IT and cybersecurity, job safety and cybersecurity, for example, a lot of that is spinoffs from the gaming and leisure industry. In addition to advanced manufacturing, we actually have some really cutting edge companies here, but they're just small. So if you look at it from an employment standpoint, we are actually, we have like 12 different sectors of the economy, and so we've been able to diversify and less and less we're reliant on travel and tourism as our main industry to employ people. What's still lagging is the value or the, essentially the worth of that industry. So a little under 50% of our GDP that comes out of gross domestic product that comes out of Southern Nevada is still tied to travel and leisure.

0:08:11
Which is unique to our neighbors.

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Look at Phoenix or Salt Lake or Boise. Or California. Yeah, a lot of those cities in California. Now I have to go back a little bit.

0:08:21
I know you talked about sort of who you are and all those things. I need to know who you root for. I see that you are from Seattle, Washington, and I just need to know if you are a Seattle Seahawks fan. So I know how friendly to be with you for the rest of this interview. Well, and honestly, yes, I do root for the Seahawks.

0:08:36
And my boy, Russell Wilson, I see, though, there's I saw alert today that he may be traded to the Denver Broncos and something. That being said, being in Vegas, you got to root for the Raiders to and and you know Derek Carr and and is it Darren Waller or the tight end he's anyway so very exciting to have an NFL team here well I'm asking as an interested Rams fans okay well it's congratulations on the Super Bowl I'll take it all right so I'm gonna be cool

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now you gave me a congratulatory statement about the Super Bowl victory

0:09:11
A lot of economics happening there.

0:09:14
Well, you know, I have to tell you another time, but my 13 year old, it took him, he was a Seattle Seahawks fan. So it hurt me to have to buy him Russell Wilson jerseys. And it hurt me bad. But he was a fan because, you know, how I don't know how that happened. But I caught a lot of ribbing from my friends about, man, how are you going to be a Rams fan? And your son is a Rivals fan. So it was crazy. Well, now now be the Broncos, right? Yeah. But I wanted to I wanted to ask you about just from what you just shared in response to Renee's question. Like what from your perspective, professional opinion, what's like an optimal optimal mix of industries in terms of GDP to make you a sustainable economy? describe this instead of in say in economic, straight economic terms is best look at examples. So Salt Lake City for 20, 30 years ago was a community that was very much dependent on certain industries. And they made an investment in higher education and in education in general from K through 12 all the way to the top. And they are now, in terms of how we measure this, which is called the Hackman Index, and you can do it by employment or GDP. It's just an interesting, you know, it's zero to one and so closer to one you're more diversified. Salt Lake, for example, is like 98% diversified and the point is that you have industries that there is no overwhelming industry that sucks up employment or GDP and so you have a lot of base. There's actually research out of our own economics department that shows essentially, you know, the more diverse you are, the easier it is to recover from economic shocks. They looked at, you know, when hurricanes hit in these towns in the Southeast, towns that were more economically diversified and not just relying on oil and gas, where you'll recover quicker. So Salt Lake's an example of that. I think Phoenix, too, you know, they were very reliant on mining, some agriculture, little bit of business services, and they've really, too, made that investment. It takes time and a little bit of patience, which is not easy for any human being, especially in a town like Vegas that never sleeps, but it pays off and you can see it again and elsewhere in the Southwest. And so I guess that's the best way to kind of talk about it is that you need to make these investments and you need that kind of long-term thinking to it.

0:11:32
So what is Nevada's number on that scale of zero to one in terms of measuring diversity?

0:11:38
So when it comes to employment, we're at 73. And when it comes to GDP, it's at 56. So you can see that essentially we actually have we've made improvements in employment. We haven't actually made improvements in the value of the services that we're selling outside of leisure and hospitality. Those those are still very strong, but they're maturing industry. So in terms of them being a driver for our employment, especially if another million people moving here in 40 years, which is really 750,000 in the next 20 years, we have to look elsewhere, too. And I do think we have those natural advantages. There are some things that we're, we can talk about that if you'd like. Oh, definitely. I was going to sort of transition to that from your perspective. What would be some natural positions or sectors that Nevada could

0:12:21
leverage its sort of just natural abilities to grow?

0:12:26
One is healthcare. So we have not only a demand for healthcare, but we're also a place that people visit. And so there's a lot of talk about how do we build this nexus when it comes, and now we have sports. So you have sports medicine, as well as medical tourism. And particularly we can find areas that say, our regional neighbors are not focusing on. So for example, in Salt Lake, they focus a lot on cardiology, because they've invented the pacemaker so for like the last 40 years they've been able to make that their own. We've talked about addiction, you know, I know the Dean of the medical school has talked about addiction and treatment is one of those areas that we could really be cutting edge and figuring out how we have that more that nexus and we obviously have a problem of that here in Southern Nevada but we can also be part of the solution with the new medical school and then our partnerships with our hospitals and our health care in our healthcare industries. Another one is manufacturing, particularly, we may not get the high, high tech manufacturing, but one of the things that we're working on at CBER right now is a white paper on lithium ion battery industry, because we have a natural advantage of having essentially every part of that industry in this state. We have mining, so we source it, which is the only lithium source in the entire United States, if you talk about on-sourcing right now. And you have all the rare earths around us, if they're not here, they're in California or Colorado that you can get cobalt, nickel, et cetera. You also then have research and development. You have several startups in Southern and Northern Nevada that are looking at how do we improve battery technology. So if it's going in your car, or it's going into the electrical grid, it's going in your cell phone. We also have assembly production up North because you have Panasonic and Tesla, which my question is why don't we have sort of one gigafactory of five gigafactories? They should think about where we are along the I-15 corridor, the I-80 corridor. And then you have recycling, which is a really interesting one because you can't mine enough lithium right now without, you know, there's just there's a limited quantity, but you can if you start recycling more of it. And you think about our energy transition and we have right now a international conflict that's causing a lot of heartburn in the energy sector. This is a perfect example of our diversification and how we can be on that forefront. So those are two examples right there. So I have a two part question.

0:14:35
One is, I'm surprised that, you know, outdoor recreation wouldn't be a great economic driver, especially with all of the different, you know, ways. I mean, we're one of the few states that you can get a beach, you can go kayaking, you can go to the mountains, you can skydive, all right here in close proximity. So I'm really shocked that that would not be a major reason or maybe that's not an economic driver. But I would also be surprised to hear that because Nevada is so diverse, that the diversification of that portfolio would be greater, considering so many of the different ethnicities that are here, that would drive that interest.

0:15:20
So I'll answer your second question, and then jump back to the first question. So yes, we are one of the most diverse states, and especially Clark County is one of the most diverse communities in the entire country. I know the US Census, when it came out, we were the third most diverse state. So you think of UNLV as a minority serving institution, the opportunities here to really educate our students and put them in the forefront because we are the face of the nation. I was just at a conference in Colorado, it was a week ago, and there was a gentleman who's very wealthy in tech and venture capital, and he wrote a book over the pandemic, and he talked about how, you know, all of the future growth in terms of entrepreneurship is going to come from women and people of color. And then he's like, come to Boulder, Colorado. And I just kind of laughed to myself. I was like, come to Las Vegas. I was like, we need in a lot of that is, is a lot of that is right now is a lot of these individuals are starting small businesses. We saw during the pandemic that Vegas is actually was one of the, the fastest growing areas for people starting a business. So not necessarily a tech startup, but just any sort of business, whether it's, you know, an e-commerce site or a food truck or anything. They were really creative and entrepreneurial, and I think that's because we were hurt so hard, or hurt so bad from the pandemic that people had to get creative. We were kind of forced in that. The issue is that what's scalable in terms of employing more people, and some of that is capital and access to capital, which there's certainly areas there with reform that could be improved upon but also I think just we don't we need to talk about it more and talk about how we have the most diverse community in the country We have the most entrepreneurial Place in the country in terms of starting a business What would we need to bring that nexus together in terms of capital? You know in terms of a business school coming out and helping I know we have a small business center And we know we're working with office economic development to build a resource center up in North Las Vegas to help because we actually saw a lot of those businesses were up in North Las Vegas for example. How we can bring more resources there. But so to answer your question, it's a huge asset. It's a huge asset and I think the country in 20 years is going to come to us and ask how do you guys do this and I hope we can say well we did do this and this is how we did it. Going back to part your first question which is about natural parks or outdoors, it is a big, it is certainly a resource and I know when you talk about economic development outside of Las Vegas but in Clark County, so in Mesquite or Laughlin or Searchlight, that is what they're talking about, is how do we do more outdoors? Whereas an economist, we may have some concerns as it still puts you at the mercy of travel and leisure. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.

0:17:59
And you can take it or leave it, right? It's not a guaranteed, yeah. Yeah, and it's not necessarily something

0:18:03
that will give you a job for 30 years.

0:18:04
No, no.

0:18:05
I want to ask you, what's one of the biggest surprises from sort of it, from being in this field that you've learned in this role here at UNLV?

0:18:14
It's a good question. I can say, I think what has been one of the areas that we've really enjoyed doing economic research in as a social scientist and an economist and really working with economists too within the business school who have PhDs and that we constantly are interacting back and forth is watching the evolution of our workforce over the last two years. And again, we just mentioned it about the entrepreneurship. You've also seen, initially, women dropped out of the workforce at higher rates than men. And there was a lot of questions of why is that? And then we also had this issue of, we had the highest job openings, I think it was about 109,000 job openings in November, but then we also had some of the highest unemployment rates, and what was that disconnect? So we actually went out and surveyed individuals who were on unemployment or with workforce connections, which means they may have been employed but looking for another job. And it's all age groups from 16 all the way to 65 or 70. And in that research, which we presented we haven't necessarily fully to the public But we've been slowly putting out there because it we're still tinkering with it We found that you know pay was important, but so was Opportunity for promotion so was value at the workplace And we asked them like you have you you know turned down a job recently and a majority said yes. We asked them, did they find ways to earn a living while they were on unemployment? And it was anonymous, so we weren't trying to get them in trouble if they were on unemployment or anything. And the majority said yes, but then we asked them what was that value, that compensation? A lot of it was just like small things that they were doing that was like zero to five hours of their time. What was interesting is childcare came in low when we asked them what priorities. Again, it was pay was number one, but right behind it was, you know, the value of the job in terms of, you know, the value that they put into the employee, flexibility, as well as transparency on pay scale, which I think is this disconnect between management and labor. But then we dug in more, and we looked at particularly women who are prime working age and had more than one kid at home, childcare was number one. And it just showed how the importance of like, don't just look at the data from the surface, like dig in and get at these different groups and see what's really happening underneath it. And that's been, we just put in our, we have a newsletter called the Rebel Business Indicators that we do every Monday, it's free. You can sign up at cber.unlv.edu. But we just put up there some more numbers that Wells Fargo put out on child care, basically showing that participation rates for women drop off, particularly when you look at age of the child, six and under, and then the number of children, more than one, and how important that, well, with men, even if they have a child that's six and under, they're still, their participation in the workforce. And this is an issue that's gonna continue on, like this isn't going away just because of the pandemic. We had a large amount of people retire during the pandemic, which has been a trend that we've been, demographers have been forecasting for decades, but it just accelerated. So this tight labor market's going to continue on. So answering your question, long-winded, what's really been fascinating in the work, I'm really proud of what we're doing, and we're just still scratching the surface on this, is the changes in our workforce and where is that going, especially when it impacts, say, Southern Nevada, you know, the need that businesses have right now for hiring, especially in leisure and hospitality or restaurants or retail. They're having a really hard time finding workers and I sympathize with them. But then I also look at data in terms of what do workers want? And we're really gonna have to, it's not just pay. You can't just raise pay. You've gotta get creative if you're running a business. And that gets back to that question about scalability because you may have new workers that are, you know, I've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence of people quitting their jobs and starting a consulting business or a new business on the side. But to scale that, you're gonna find workers, so then we're gonna have to get really creative.

0:22:08
And so how do you advise, not just entrepreneurs or business owners, but higher education? We're challenged with high turnover and trying to attract employees and student workers, and then the school district is one of the biggest employers and they, you know, trying to find teachers. What are some of the, I guess, non-traditional ways to make positions more attractive?

0:22:33
And if I could just tag team to that question, because, you know, these are minority serving institution with so many first generation students. And we pride ourselves on providing access. The mission to be student facing. Right. Is is so important. Right. And so therefore, that can sometimes take away from that flexibility of being able to offer to a candidate for them to 75% be at home when we need to be here to talk to the students, provide services to the students, provide wraparound services. We have, what, over 40% of our students are non-traditional. And so they need also those types of services as well. They can't just necessarily be here for the traditional eight to five hours of operation.

0:23:16
Yeah, and once people got a taste of the pandemic, being able to do work from home, everyone's now like reluctant or resistant to returning to work in this in a traditional capacity and trying to figure out how do you find that right balance. So from your expertise, what are some advice that you would provide to like these traditional employers like the university and the school district have taken more of a conservative approach to how they structure the work setting or the workplace for, for now, what we're faced with now in terms of expectations that you describe.

0:23:49
Well, those are big questions that are probably above my pay grade. But I do, you know, as they say, it takes a village to raise a child. And I think it's more so now than it was. It's always been that way. But certainly in the last two years, it's come very relevant that we don't do enough. And there is a question always about money, and money is only just one part of the solution. I also think it's a lot about effective, not only policy, but how you put together an organization that supports that. As you see that teachers are turning into both social workers, therapists, business, I don't know, they're helping just making sure the kid gets to school. Right, I mean, and I think they've, and I think all of our first responders during the pandemic, whether they're in healthcare or in public safety, were also, they were already doing that before the pandemic, but they were especially during the pandemic. So I think there's a question as a community, what can we do, you know, in economics, we talk about incentives, what are the incentives that we are putting in place to really make jobs rewarding? And if you look at the survey data, not only what we've done, but nationally, it's not just simply giving them a one-time bonus and patting them on the back and saying, good job. I mean, you see nurses, they can make a lot of money, but they're burned out. They've been through, when you talk to them or people that, therapists that have been working with nurses that worked in these COVID units, they say it's PTSD. It's like they've been through a war zone. So there's more of this wraparound services, I think, where you have to be creative about how do we think about providing support from multiple different levels and mentorships and support staff, and really valuing those support staff. And again, it's not just about pay, it's about kind of the environment that you're putting them in. I can tell you at least just personally for the Center of Business and Economic Research, one of the things that we really want to do and we're working on and we're expanding is the amount of students that are doing real world research so we are a minority serving institution. We have an incredible opportunity to give our students real world experience in their backyard. If it's the community's problem, it's our problem is my mindset when it comes to the research that we're doing. So we should be pumping out white papers that students help write that talk about these different areas and education housing Affordability public safety etc that we can be a service and that they also take some ownership of their community because I think Part of this is realizing that an education is not just simply getting good grades and getting a certificate You know a degree at the end of the day. It's important certainly to have that degree from your economic standpoint, but it's also something a little bit more deeper, which is actually having experience and ownership over the community that you live in so that you then want to make it better.

0:26:33
All right. Well, thank you for all that informative information. Renee, what were some of your takeaways? You know, if I had my emoji, my head is just like, in agreement with all the things that Andrew has shared.

0:26:48
Well, he certainly showed us there's a bigger problem than I thought. And, you know, we are tasked with running large units and trying to figure out how to provide these types of services to make our jobs competitive but to keep employees satisfied and, you know, to keep the workplace, you know, somewhere that people want to come and remain and provide services. I'm glad that he talked about medical tourism. I know that's certainly on the horizon for UNLV, and I'm also glad that he made the point that diversity counts. It matters. It's an asset to Las Vegas. It's an asset just in general. And we can see here that we are primed to be successful because of the diversity that already exists here. I learned so much from this presentation, and I really want to know, like, what does he do every day? He was so great and so eloquent about talking about the study of this work. But we have to invite him back just to find out what are all the different nuances and ways that he's doing these white papers and other ways he's contributing from the director position.

0:27:54
What about you? Yeah, I think similar to you, in addition to what you shared is what resonated with me was just really understanding the changes in the workforce, especially post pandemic, that, you know, parties have changed. You know, the the makeup of the workforce has changed. And, you know, the priorities of what's important have changed. And I think if we haven't learned anything, is that people now aren't just going to come and take any position at any pay, look at holistically, how do you recruit, attract and hire and retain talent? And so I'm certainly looking forward to the next generation of what's going to be produced from the center. And then the other thing I was excited to hear is this really giving students the opportunity to participate in some of the research and to give them real world experience that pertains to what's happening here in the local economy.

0:28:51
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Transcribed with Cockatoo