Driving the news: Amid the more than 200 also-ran cities with broken hearts, there are places like Columbus — the beneficiary of giant economic strides by its own efforts over the years, but retaining the stubborn, starry-eyed hope of one day capturing one of the big fish.

Yet experts tell Axios that a big message of the Amazon sweepstakes is that middle-size U.S. cities should look elsewhere for an economic lift.

“The higher productivity arising from the dense concentration of very high-skill programming talent in San Francisco, New York City and D.C. cannot be matched by smaller markets such as Columbus,” Joseph Gyourko, a professor at UPenn, tells Axios. “They have to be attractive on other margins, and a much lower cost of living with a good set of urban amenities is how they must do it.”

“As a country, we’d be much better if the cities were not competing to hand out checks to the biggest companies in the world,” says Jay Shambaugh, director of The Hamilton Project at Brookings.