About 100 miles east of Los Angeles, Palm Springs, with its cloudless skies, bright sunshine and warm temperatures, was the desert playground of golden-era Hollywood.

There's been a lot of hubbub about the effort tech whiz Tony Hsieh and his crack team of acolytes have put into revitalizing downtown Las Vegas. In case you missed it, Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, in January 2012 announced that he was putting $350 million into the Downtown Project, which would fund new businesses in an economically depressed part of the city seven miles north of the Las Vegas Strip. He also wanted to create a tech hub in a city better known for gambling and tourism, which some journalists dubbed the newest "techtopia."

Nevada Treasurer Dan Schwartz and Controller Ron Knecht, two fiscal conservatives swept into office by the Republican wave, have released an alternative Nevada budget to rival GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval’s spending plan.

A two-year slide in gold and quieter casino tables have opened a $170 million hole in Nevada’s budget even as its economy booms, pushing Governor Brian Sandoval to rethink dependence on mining and gambling.

In academia, plagiarism is considered high crime. But what if the culprit comes from the agency that oversees higher education in the state? Documents show Frank Woodbeck, executive director of the College Collaborative with the Nevada System of Higher Education, copied large sections of a Brookings Mountain West report draft to create a competitive grant.

Two weeks before the election, early voting began in Nevada. More than 20 political organizers filed in to a room at the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, one of the state’s most powerful labor groups. The union represents more than 55,000 casino and hotel workers, from housekeepers and cocktail waitresses to cooks and doormen — more than half of them Hispanic.

Most of the young people that go to college go away, and then they don't come back," says Lee Bianchi, a retired engineer who lived in Clinton, Iowa (pop. 26,647), from 1961 to 2008.

What a difference four years makes. In Fall 2010, Brookings Mountain West began program planning for a statewide gathering to discuss the broken Nevada economy. In January 2011, UNLV hosted an event—Nevada 2.0—in coordination with Brookings Mountain West, the Las Vegas Metro Chamber of Commerce, the Secretary of State, and newly elected Governor Sandoval’s economic development advisors. Nevada was the state most damaged by the Great Recession. The state’s GDP stood well below its 2007 high and there appeared no immediate path to restore prosperity. But the Great Recession also provided Nevada a chance to rethink its entire approach to economic development.