Bright Lights, Small City

In connection with today's upbeat P-G Forum piece about Pittsburgh's future by a pair of Rand Corporation research, Chris Briem points me to this slightly longer and more detailed Rand report on Pittsburgh's demographics (pdf file).

Rand's key observations:
1. Further Population Aging is in Store. The young will get old, and the old will get older.
2. Young Workers Will Be Relatively Scarce. Unless the pace of in-migration increases.
3. Young People Will Move Toward Economic Opportunity. The report notes that this is already happening -- Pittsburgh's "brain drain" has largely abated. But in-migration is dynamically related to job growth.
4. Immigrants Will Bring New Growth to Many Areas of the Nation. The authors don't quite come out and say so, but the clear implication is that Pittsburgh needs to focus on attracting the foreign-born in order to get and stay ahead of the curve.