ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: Major investment firm AllianceBernstein packs up for Nashville, taking more than 1,000 high-paying jobs with it.

The Nashville Tennessean had some good news for its readers this week: AllianceBernstein (AB), a global money-management firm with nearly 3,500 employees and half a trillion dollars in assets, will bring 1,050 well-paying jobs to the capital of the Volunteer State. New Yorkers, though, could be forgiven for not realizing that Nashville’s gain was their loss; no New York newspaper prominently featured the story of a major investment firm forsaking Gotham for Music City. New Yorkers’ natural reaction, if they did hear of the news, might be: who needs ‘em, anyway? The city is already straining under a record population, record employment, and record tourism. Yet the reasons AB executives cited for the move should worry New York. New York is no longer a high-cost city with high-value amenities; rather, it is increasingly a high-cost city with low-value public services, most notably transportation infrastructure.

How could that have happened under a mayor who compares himself to Edison, Ford, and Gandhi?