politics & education

Last night there was a discussion on NPR about the challenge of getting politicians in Africa to allocate resources to schools for children.

Suppose that citizens were routinely polled about the mix of their time spent on the 6 correlation-layers that look in/out from skin, family & culture.

If from these community inputs politicians were graded on what they do to increase niche-network layer-multiplicity and the size of the middle class (i.e. individuals able to direct their time toward things like culture and profession), this would create a numerical incentive for them to help educate kids as well as to minimize social-network disruptions.  It might also provide a more robust and quantitative definition of poverty, reigning in deniers and at the same time explicitly valuing opportunity to interact with friends and family independent of participation in the monetary economy.

Without this, of course, politicians may do better for themselves and their family by figuring how to make the rich (including themselves) richer as the middle class shrinks. If we don't lessen the temptation, isn't this like putting the goldfish bowl in reach of the cat?

What do you think?