How Pittsburgh’s Economic Garden Can Grow
“Do what you can with all you have, wherever you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt
I have vivid memories as a 10-year-old helping my Italian-immigrant grandfather in his one-acre garden of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and I forget what else. I remember the smell of ripe vegetables, soil, and how everything seemed so fragile, as he ever so carefully weeded, watered, and de-leafed his plants. Yet despite that seeming fragility, he produced heaps of the biggest tomatoes and greenest peppers you ever saw, or at least that is how I remember it. The recent AI and Energy summit here in Pittsburgh reminded me that our city and region remain a fragile garden in need of focused, careful tending to create local economic abundance. This summit was a great start. But we have more work to do.
Our economy has grown in the last decade or so at around 0.5 – 1% per year in real terms. Yet the U.S. economy grew at two and half times that rate at the same time. And while unemployment here is sometimes a full 1% lower than the national average – owing to the density of downturn-resistant healthcare, education, and technology employers – we keep losing population. We had the second-largest rate of decline for large U.S. metro areas from 2022 to 2023.
Fortunately, the summit provided tangible hope for all of us who want to see the Pittsburgh economy grow and possibly grow faster and farther than it has in decades. The interesting thing about a robust and resilient garden, forest, or economy is that it depends on diversity as a source of strength. Ecologists know biodiversity strengthens ecosystems. In agriculture, ‘monocropping’ is the practice of cultivating a single crop species on a piece of land. A single threat to that plant and it’s game over for the whole crop. A forest, in contrast, with many different tree species will more likely survive, say, disease or drought than one with a single tree type.
Economic monocultures are also (very) fragile. In the 1970s and 1980s, Boston rivaled Silicon Valley as America's premier high-tech region. Companies like Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang Laboratories dominated the “minicomputer” industry. But when the personal computer arrived, these once great companies disappeared and the “Route 128 miracle” faded from memory. Pittsburgh, too, survived the consequences of industrial “monocropping,” with the devastating collapse of its economy in the 1970s and 1980s resulting from the demise of a handful of major basic industries, such as steel and chemicals.
Fortunately, our excellent local education and healthcare institutions, a residual benefit owing partly to the presence of local long-gone or diminished industrial giants, survived that decline and now provide the seeds for a new and, hopefully, more complex, diverse, and interdependent economy. Time will tell, but things are beginning to get interesting.
Regions that cultivate “related variety” or diverse clusters of related industries can win – and win big. The fact that our recent summit was a healthy mixture of AI and energy is interesting. One caveat: AI is suffering “semantic satiation” or the case when a particular word or phrase is used so much that it loses its meaning. For our purposes, AI is unlike any technology in history in one important way: it learns. When machines can learn by doing a wild mix of diverse innovations and industries can emerge in ways no one can predict.
AI’s inherent learning capacity, still a work in progress, put (autonomous) robots on the surface of other planets, duplicated infinitely complex biological processes, inspected crops, roads, bridges, ships hulls, and missile silos, and driven cars, trucks, planes, submarines, ships, motorbikes, and robots. The list goes on and on. Inexpensive and readily available energy will also enable yet-to-be thoughts of innovations. Growing them together in one place, our place, could release wild and powerful creative forces.
But, again, our emerging regional economy is still fragile. We must take care to nurture a robust entrepreneurial culture, along with local and state policies and actions that create and sustain eternally fertile soil. We have been making slow but steady progress on the former over the last decade but not so much on the latter. The summit, which brought together a wide spectrum of entrepreneurs together with local, state, and national leadership (from both parties!) is a great beginning.
However, gardening is not engineering. There are uncontrollable forces like the weather and disease that affect ecologies and economies in unpredictable ways. Yet the experiences of the most successful economic regions in the world reveal that, while you cannot engineer a predetermined outcome, you can spend a lot more effort on creating the conditions for that wonderful diversity and complexity to organically emerge. Linear thinking and measurable targets look and sound great but in economic ecosystems, like biological ones, operate according to their own logic. We must work like hell to provide the soil, water, and sunlight that allow innovation to take root and grow.
