Coming soon to Dupont Circle?

It’s not a secret: while much of the country remains mired in the effects of the recession, D.C. is steadily recovering. In fact, it’s often said that D.C. didn’t feel the impact of the recession in the same way that other parts of the country did. To conservative pundit Glenn Reynolds, that reality seems a little too much like a popular piece of fiction:

We don’t live in The Hunger Games yet, but I’m not the first to notice that Washington, D.C., is doing a lot better than the rest of the country. Even in upscale parts of L.A. or New York, you see boarded up storefronts and other signs that the economy isn’t what it used to be. But not so much in the Washington area, where housing prices are going up, fancy restaurants advertise $92 Wagyu steaks, and the Tyson’s Corner mall outshines — as I can attest from firsthand experience — even Beverly Hills’ famed Rodeo Drive.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the contrast is even starker. As Adam Davidson recently wrote in The New York Times, riding the Amtrak between New York and D.C. exposes stark contrasts between the “haves” of the capital and the have-nots outside the Beltway. And he correctly assigns this to the importance of power.

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

Reynolds, who made the claim in a USA Today column, certainly isn’t the first to compare Washington’s standing vis-à-vis the rest the country to The Hunger Games, though—in a recent column of his own, the New York Times’s Ross Douthat largely made the same claim:

There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.

The Times’ Washington bureau chief, David Leonhardt, made a similar assessment a few months earlier, writing of how D.C. has escaped the worst of the recession.

Thankfully, Leonhardt delved a little deeper than Reynolds or Douthat, writing that one of the reasons that the Washington region has done so well is that it very well educated: “In an economy ever more organized around knowledge, Washington’s employers — from biotechnology and Internet companies to retail and health care — have an easier time finding workers who fit their needs. Especially in bad times, employers can have more confidence they are hiring someone they will want to keep.”