To say that the keys to the city are in the hands of the Keystone Kops (or Abbott and Costello, or Laurel and Hardy, or the Three Stooges) -- well, to say that is too kind. They're fiddling, and the city is burning.
Are we obliged, by the way, to repeat the "Pittsburgh is dying" mantra every time someone dares to suggest that all is not entirely lost? I'm willing to assume, absent evidence to the contrary, that the person interviewed on NPR yesterday morning wasn't simply repeating the local party line. The CFO magazine article is now on the web, and to me it mostly bears this out. The author doesn't say much about regional politics or economics that local observers don't already know, but he doesn't sugarcoat it, either.
A colleague of mine pointed out that thanks in part to federal money, some of the neighborhood development organizations in Pittsburgh are doing reasonably well. That judgment doesn't represent thorough research, and it doesn't represent any large number of new jobs, and it doesn't offset the lack of any significant in-migration to the region. But it does suggest that there may be something to the intuition that despite the catastrophe at the political top, there are little rays of economic light here and there, around the edges. Is this just wishful thinking on my part?
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