The continuing crisis? The minimum level of funding the state of Illinois currently guarantees to all school districts: $4,560 per pupil per year. Amount recommended by the Ikenberry Commission in 1996: $4,225. Amount recently recommended by the Center for the Study of Educational Policy at Illinois State University: $4,946. Amount recommended in a recent study by Augenblick & Meyers: between $5,000 and $5,500. (Figures are from the Metropolitan Planning Council’s September issue of “Issue Brief.”)
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The riots that never happened. Thomas Bier of Cleveland State University writes in a paper published by the Brookings Institution, “Moving Up, Filtering Down: Metropolitan Housing Dynamics and Public Policy” (September): “America has yet to come to grips with the fact that its way of dealing with ‘old’ real estate, which is the same way that it deals with cars and refrigerators, eventually decimates suburbs just as it decimated major cities. Use, sell, move on. The only difference is time–houses decline more slowly….If all the decline that occurred in the past 25 years had instead been contained within one year, surely civil and political upheaval would have followed.”
How to renew “nonrenewable” resources. “A piece of copper ore is just a rock unless one has the knowledge to mine, melt, refine, alloy, mill, shape, and ship it,” writes Ronald Bailey in “Reason Online” (August 29). “The Stone Age didn’t end because humanity ran out of stones. Whether some physical quantity is a resource or not depends crucially on our knowledge about it….People create resources by finding uses for what once seemed useless. In [Stanford economist Paul] Romer’s words, ‘Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking.’ We make ourselves better off not by increasing the amount of stuff on planet Earth–that is, of course, effectively fixed–but by rearranging the stuff we have available so that it provides us with more of what we want.”
