The Bigger Picture
The whitepaper modules propose specific things the community can do right now. These pages step back and ask: why is this happening, and what would it take to actually fix the underlying problem - not just for our school district, but for communities everywhere facing the same squeeze?
These sections include thought experiments - ways of seeing the crisis that might open up paths we haven’t considered. Finally a potential action plan is presented.
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The Shrinking Slice - Where is our money actually going? A visualization of how the community’s share of its own economic activity has eroded over time.
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The Void - What if we stripped everything away and rebuilt from first principles? A thought experiment about what things actually cost in time versus what we pay in dollars.
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The Virtuous Spiral - What if costs went down instead of always up? How to distinguish greed from genuine cost, good vs bad deflation,and how every savings passed forward creates more.
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The Action Plan - From theory to practice, the three-prong plan: fix the right now, fix the process, fix the economics.