What Does Losing Amazon Say About Dallas? Not Much

After the intense and public competition to lure Amazon's second headquarters, officials in many cities around the country that lost out are asking: Why? Could we have offered bigger subsidies? Done a better job of touting our economic strengths? Placed more emphasis on quality of life?

This kind of re-evaluation can occasionally be useful for local officials. But in the aftermath of the Amazon competition, it's important for cities, especially those like Dallas that made it to the final cut, not to make too much of the internet giant's ultimate choice of New York and northern Virginia for its newest major office locations. These selections may have been more about the emergence of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as a public figure trying to shape national policy than about the economic competitiveness of the chosen locations.

Like most of the founders of technology giants that are reshaping our economic landscape, Bezos started out as an intensely focused, inward-looking executive who famously packed his wife and himself up in a car and drove from New York to Seattle to start Amazon. He kept a low profile for years as he expanded a company that, as it grew bigger, transformed the business of selling things.

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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal.  

This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News