It is a rare American city of any appreciable size that has not fallen for the siren song that investing in a public convention center is a great way to generate jobs and “economic impact.” Supposedly, the inflow of convention attendees will give the local economy a boost and at the same time enhance the city’s image and build civic pride.

Since the 1950s, cities as great as New York and Chicago and as small as Cedar Rapids and Omaha have built convention centers, often expanding and upgrading them several times. Officials and business leaders love to tout the apparent success of these centers, but seldom has any skeptical reporter, scholar, or politician dug for the whole truth.

For that reason, Heywood Sanders’ book, Convention Center Follies, fills a gigantic gap in our understanding. Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas, San Antonio, offers a devastating analysis of the phenomenon of public convention centers.

City and state governments have sunk billions into these projects over the last decade, always with the expectation that they will produce a gusher of spending from outsiders. The reality is quite different. These investments are almost without exception boondoggles. “While communities have proven remarkably capable of building new and larger centers, they have proven remarkably unsuccessful in filling them. From Atlanta to Seattle, Boston to Las Vegas, the promises of local officials and the forecasts of consultants have come up short,” Sanders writes.

Space for conventions (and smaller meetings) can be provided by the private sector, of course. For instance, casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson has a million- square-foot convention center in Las Vegas. The market can supply the need for convention and exhibition facilities. The pressure for government-owned and ‑operated centers is not because of market failure.

Instead, it stems from the fact that local business leaders have strong motives for placing convention centers in downtown areas and having taxpayers pick up most of the cost. They want big projects that they hope will protect downtown property values and (in some cases at least) serve as buffers dividing the glitzy downtown from “menacing” poor residential and business districts.

In other words, while they pay lip service to improving the economy of “the city,” business leaders are really just interested in their own bottom lines. This is just another instance of the sordid game of using politics to further private gains.

Support / Why do politicians almost always go along with these plans? Because, Sanders observes, they suffer from “edifice complex”—they love to be associated with big, newsworthy projects that sound like brilliant policy moves. Such projects have immediate political benefits, but if they do not pay off in the long run, very few voters will know about it or connect them with the fiasco.

Another reason—although Sanders does not stress this point—is that construction firms and unions provide support for these projects because they mean big money for them. The projects usually require major builders with considerable expertise and equipment, employing high-skilled, unionized workers.

Once the special interest groups and politicians have decided to commit public resources to a new or improved convention center, they commission an “expert study” on its feasibility. These studies invariably forecast great success for the project, and ominously warn about losing out to other cities if it does not go forward.

Throughout the book, we read of one “expert” study after another, all using similar dubious methods and data to reach the same conclusion: the project is a certain winner.

Here is one example of bogus data: The experts routinely assume that the typical attendee will spend three nights in the convention city, staying in a hotel and eating meals at restaurants. Independent studies, however, have shown that the actual number is less than half that. Furthermore, many attendees are local people, so whatever they spend is money they probably would have spent in the area anyway.

Unfortunately, the accuracy of past studies is never an issue. They are not meant as serious analysis. They are just part of the sales pitch and always paint a rosy picture. Sanders gives no instance where a convention center project was turned down because politicians found the study not to be credible, although in one case (Nashville’s Music City Center), the boosters decided to “wait out” an administration where the mayor’s finance director was convinced that the center would become a “serious drain” on resources. They did so and the project was later built.

Backers of these projects turn a blind eye to the current downward trend in the number of conventions and the people who attend them, as online technology makes it less and less necessary for people to be physically present to obtain information. For example, the sporting goods Super Show had 112,000 attendees in 1995, but that number fell to 20,000 in 2005, and the show was canceled the following year. This trend never shows up in the “expert” studies because the experts manipulate their data to disguise it, and they can always cherry pick a success story to justify their claim that a city had better build now to catch the coming wave of new convention business.

Turning to states / Another important aspect of the convention center mania is the way boosters have managed to shift away from local votes on bonds or tax increases to finance the projects, and instead depend on state action.

Despite all the cheerleading from politicians, business leaders, and newspaper editors (who seem to fall easily for the Keynesian theory that these “investments” will stimulate the economy through “multiplier” effects), voters sometimes turn thumbs-down on the financing. A considerable number of voters can see through the rhetoric about “revitalizing the city” and understand that it means that one part of the city will benefit at the expense of other, mostly poorer, parts. That has led boosters to avoid voters by turning to state politics.

Horse trading in the state legislature can be easier than trying to persuade local voters, and therefore convention centers are now often part of a package of goodies for different parts of the state. That tactic helps to win the necessary votes and spread the cost more widely. In the 1991 expansion of Chicago’s McCormick Place, for example, the deal for state funding included a requirement that Chicago utility companies would continue to use high-sulfur coal mined downstate.

The book abounds in detail about the machinations in city after city. Readers learn, for example, that in Phoenix, Ariz., the downtown interests succeeded in getting a vast expansion of the old convention center, naturally saying it would have great economic effects. But when those effects failed to materialize, they said it was because the center lacked a grand hotel. Despite a consultant’s study forecasting success, no hotel chain was willing to invest in one, so the city sold bonds to sink $350 million into building a 1,000 room hotel that Sheraton now manages. As Sanders acidly writes, “The repeated reluctance of any private developer to finance such a project was taken not as a measure of risk but as simply a short-term impediment to be overcome.” Occupancy at the hotel has been well below projections, and in 2011 Moody’s downgraded the bonds. In 2012, the hotel had to rely on other city resources to meet its debt payments.

The Phoenix story comes early in the book, and for the next several hundred pages we get many more like it. Sanders’ national tour of convention center deception and failure will remind you of the “Peanuts” cartoons where Lucy, time after time, pulls away the football and Charlie Brown winds up flat on his back.

One of the most common mistakes Americans make is to think that people in business are defenders of the free market. This book shows that many business people will happily look to government for projects that give them gains while spreading socialized losses on the rest of the city or state. The convention center story is no different from the sports stadium story or “redevelopment” story: potent local business interests talk politicians into big projects that generate benefits for themselves, while imposing costs on the rest of the population. It is an object lesson in the problem that public choice theory has exposed in democracy, namely that it is easily manipulated by people who claim to be acting for the public good.

Although Sanders does not directly say so, his book’s message is clear: we would be better off if we left the construction of convention centers to capitalism, not government.