How Fort Worth Stacks Up With Global Peers Does Not Have Me Green With Envy

I am having myself a backlog of blogging fodder. I'd forgotten about this gem I saw over a week ago in the Seattle Times which fits our ongoing theme of things I read in online west coast news sources that I likely would never read in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Only this instance came with a very ironic twist.

The article is titled How Seattle stacks up among some global peers.

The first three paragraphs of the article---

I’ve worked in places where boosters measured the local economy against smaller, weaker cities, used very narrow criteria (say, housing starts) and declared victory.

So it’s bracing and constructive that the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce has the Boston Consulting Group weighing us against some real global peers: Amsterdam, Boston, Hamburg, Melbourne, San Francisco, Singapore, Stockholm and Vancouver, B.C.

In addition, the respected global management consulting firm, which has a Seattle office, used 150 different points of comparison.

That first paragraph had me wondering if the author had worked in Fort Worth; Boosters measuring the town against smaller, weaker towns while using narrow criteria.

So, apparently Seattle came out well in getting stacked up against some global peers. That led to a paragraph which contained some verbiage which made me cringe, verbiage of the sort I used to cringe at in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but which the Star-Telegram greatly toned down, once  it was realized how cringeworthy the verbiage was.

Here is the paragraph to which I refer....

“Retaining jobs isn’t standing in place,” Daudon said. For our size, “we’re the envy of the nation. Then we have to grow them, too. These will be more like computer tech jobs and less like blue-collar ones.”

Envy of the nation.

I made an entire webpage about instances in the Star-Telegram claiming some perfectly mundane thing in Fort Worth was causing spasms of Green with Envy fever across the world. The Star-Telegram used multiple iterations of the envy sentiments. I could be 'envy of'' such as the Seattle Times used, or 'green with envy' or other variants I am not remembering right now.

Now, maybe the Seattle Times did some sort of survey and somehow discovered that Seattle ranking well with these global peer cities made Seattle the envy of the nation.

But I suspect not.

I suspect few, if any, other towns in America are aware Seattle ranked well against these random global peer cities, rendering the Seattle Times, in this instance, just as goofy as the Star-Telegram.....