In today’s “Money Stuff,” with the caveat that this is a “simple” if “cruel and reductive . . . explanation of how [a particular] machine works,” Matt Levine writes:

The financial industry is in the business of intermediation, and it earns its living by doing trades. It is a volume business, “moving not storage”; the job is not to do the platonically correct transaction but to keep doing transactions. If you could find the platonically correct transaction, the thing that makes your client happy forever, you wouldn’t have the client anymore. If the allocation of capital ever became perfectly, permanently correct, a lot of people would be out of jobs.

In the education industry, to apply my own simple, cruel, and reductive logic, the goal should be the opposite: to aspire to make the transactions platonically correct so as to ensure (a) transformation in each student and (b) obsolescence of the school itself for each student at the right time. Storage not moving.