phxated_wymanTalton, a former Republic columnist and now a Seattle-based journalist and mystery writer, maintains a blog that has quickly become one of PHXated’s favorites: Rogue Columnist.

He’s back in town visiting, and has been posting some impressions. The first graf has a lot in it:

Traveling around Arizona, it’s difficult to imagine how the state can turn itself around, even if a majority understood the term. For most, a turnaround would mean a return to 40-percent population growth every decade, more sprawl, more “active adult resort living — with championship golf!,” more spec retail development and office “parks” to house the real-estate outfits, mortgage boiler rooms and call centers. The dirty secret is that as an economy, Arizona outside of Phoenix and Tucson is “the Third World,” as a prominent booster economist once told me, not for attribution. An overstatement of course, although the Third World also has its gated enclaves of the super-rich and depends heavily on tourism. But among the states, Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson performed dismally on almost any measure of economic well-being except for housing starts and population growth, the latter a mixed indicator that carries huge costs, too. And this was before the Great Recession.

The rest is here.