Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue

The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. But nowhere in American literature, until now, has an economist hit the road, observing and interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, bringing out its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight.

Disillusioned with academic life after thirty-two years teaching economics, Michael Yates took early retirement in 2001, with a pension account that had doubled during the dot.com frenzy of the late 1990s. He and his wife Karen have traveled around the country since then, often spending months at a time on the road. Michael and Karen spent the summer of 2001 in Yellowstone National Park, where Michael worked as a hotel front-desk clerk. They moved to Manhattan for a year, where he worked for Monthly Review. From there they went to Portland, Oregon, to explore the Pacific Northwest. After five months of travel in Summer and Fall 2004, they settled in Miami Beach. Ahead of the 2005 hurricane season, they went back on the road, settling this time in Colorado.

Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating examination of work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: The Road Beckons

• Route 22
• Johnstown and Pittsburgh
• Work Turns Sour
• The Road Beckons
• Themes of the Book
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Two: Yellowstone National Park

• The Journey Begins
• Training to Be a Guest Service Agent
• Amfac’s Workforce
• Serving the Guests
• A New Respect for Workers
• In and Around the Park
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Three: Manhattan

• Nine-Eleven
• Apartment Hunting in the Shadow of Disaster
• A Dream Come True
• Another Job
• Walking the City’s Streets
• Dinner Party
• Leaving Manhattan
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Four: Portland and the Pacific Northwest

• We Take on Company
• It’s Raining
• The Pacific Northwest
• Work Vicariously
• A Liberal City
• Wanderlust
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Five: Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate I

• Do They Still Make Hot Plates?
• South Down Interstate 5
• Joshua Tree, Williams, Flagstaff, and Sedona
• New Mexico
• The Rest of the West
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Six: Miami Beach

• We Live among the Beautiful People
• Calle Ocho
• Nude Beach
• The Everglades
• Key West
• Casino
• Suggested Readings

Chapter Seven: From the Gulf Coast to Estes Park

• The Gulf Coast
• New Orleans
• Into Texas and Back to the Southwest
• My Hometown
• The Journey Continues
• Suggested Readings

Michael D. Yates is associate editor of Monthly Review. He was professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown for many years. His other books include Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy and Why Unions Matter. Also see the Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate website for continuing updates.