Are we that bad?

There’s a back-handed compliment buried in there.

If you’re a “think tank” dumping yet another new study on a jaded press and public, ranking cities from best to worst on some topic or other, there’s one sure way to make headlines. Highlight the high (or, usually, extremely low) ranking of the one town Americans never tire of hearing about:

Vegas, baby!

So how surprised should we be that the Brookings Institution, which is based in Washington but now has a local Nevada research arm, said Tuesday the Las Vegas Valley has the “world’s fifth-worst economy”?

The think tank ranked the region No. 146 on its Global Metro Monitor, which rates the world’s 150 biggest metropolitan economies on their economic strength before, during and after the recession.

Does this even pass the smell test?

Throw a few darts at any map of the world and then try saying aloud: “Yeah, we were planning on opening a new branch of our retail chain in Las Vegas, but the economy there turns out to be so bad, we’re going instead with the new site in Somalia. Wait, did I say Somalia? I meant North Korea … no, no, Burma … um, Bangladesh. No, I mean we’re moving to that international capital of bribery and corruption once called the Congo but now known as Zaire.”

To stack its rankings, researchers at Brookings considered each region’s “overall gross value added,” which measures the worth of goods and services produced in an area’s economy. They then report they “weighed gross value added per capita and changes in employment and population.” And since some statistics from 2008, 2009 and 2010 aren’t yet available, the group then “forecast some indicators to fill in the blanks.”

Which is nothing like “making stuff up,” you understand.

In its final result, the Brookings report’s assessment of Las Vegas is less a measure of economic torpor than proof of just how volatile the city’s economy is, the authors admit.

“Places like Buffalo (ranked No. 120) look fantastic because they didn’t boom or bust,” explains Robert Lang, director of “Brookings Mountain West” at UNLV. “What this shows is, given how high a flier we were, our conditions are dismal relative to that performance. Not only did we crash deeply, but we’re underperforming in the recovery.”

So the point is that Las Vegas, tourist-dependent and hit hard by the real estate collapse, has been slow to emerge from recession?

Not exactly “stop the presses” news, is it? So the Brookings folk instead adopt a methodology which leads them to declare Buffalo, snow capital of the rust belt, ranks higher than Las Vegas as an economic investment target because Buffalo never boomed at all?

In other words — for the benefit of the irony-deprived — it’s hogwash.