I hate to single out one line from an interview — really, you should read the interview for yourself — but this line from Walter Isaacson’s interview with Larry Summers leapt out at me:

It is crazy if you think about it, that we have schools across this country where we tell our kids that education is the most important thing in the world, but we ask them to study in classrooms where the paint is chipping off the walls.

Does Summers really believe this?

I’d suggest that a motivated, competent instructor is more important than paint chipping off the walls. I’d also suggest that declining student-teacher ratios have diluted the teacher talent pool, i.e., has made it somewhat less likely that students will have access to motivated, competent instructors. At the same time, declining student-teacher ratios have sharply increased compensation bills. Gleaming facilities may well be a nice thing. But do we have any reason to believe that money devoted to facilities is being well-spent, and that we couldn’t deliver a higher quality of service at lower cost if incentives were aligned properly? I assume that Summers has thought about all of this and he was making a folksy remark. I suppose I found it alarming because I was thinking of the extraordinary success of India’s IITs, not known for gleaming facilities in the 1970s and 1980s, when the produced a generation of technology innovators that is changing the world, and I was also thinking about my own public school education, when chipping paint didn’t play a particularly important role in my education.

This is polemical of me, I realize. But it was stuck in my craw. Contrast this with Mitch Daniels’ remarks to Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard, which sparked so much enthusiasm for the Indiana governor:

Later I remarked to Daniels how the schools I’d seen in Indiana all had the same gleam and polish: immaculate athletic fields, vast cafeterias, swimming pools.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s a problem.”
I’d meant to flatter him but he sounded appalled.
“When we were first campaigning, I started to notice, we’d drive through these rural counties, these very poor counties, and we’d drive up over a hill and on the other side you’d see a brand-new high school that looked like Frank Lloyd Wright had just been there. Enormous gold-plated buildings. It turned out we had higher capital expenditures for educational construction per square foot than any other state. There’d be a bond issue and then the architects and contractors would run amok, spending money on things that had nothing to do with academics. I understand why it happens. The school board likes it because they get to play designer for a year. But we couldn’t afford it.”
Daniels put a 120-day moratorium on new school bond issues. “We’ve told them, if you propose a project that costs more per square foot than the national average, be prepared to show cause.”
Daniels is a font of statistics, but one comes to his lips more than any other. “Only 61 cents of every education dollar gets into the classroom in Indiana.” School funding increased every year under Daniels before the recession, and since the downturn, when most areas of state government have seen cuts of 25 percent or more, education has been reduced by only 2 percent. Yet the local school boards and their Democratic allies in the state legislature continue to complain. Daniels calls education funding “the bloody shirt” of Indiana politics: “It doesn’t take long before somebody starts waving it.”

Summers is a scholar I greatly admire, with a wide-ranging intellect and a long and impressive record of accomplishment. But I’ll happily take Daniels over Summers, not least because Daniels is distinctly un-inclined to wave bloody shirts.

I should specify that Summers makes some damn good points later in the interview, e.g.,

We have infrastructure in this country — I mean you can argue whether we need a new high speed rail system or whether we don’t need a new high speed rail system. But I don’t know what the argument is for letting bridges collapse. I don’t know what the argument is.

But then he gets on my nerves again:

I mean every time, and unfortunately it’s fairly often, I fly in and out of Kennedy Airport to any other airport in the world that you might fly to from Kennedy — you can fly to Europe, you can fly to Asia, any of those places, and you compare Kennedy Airport with the airport where you land, and you ask yourself which is the airport of the greatest country, richest, most powerful country in the world?
I mean, and you know, you can say airports aren’t that important or whatever. But it is symbolic of an approach to infrastructure that probably never made any sense, and certainly doesn’t make any sense when you can borrow money at 2.8 percent and you’ve got 20 percent of the construction workers unemployed.

It is “symbolic of an approach.” Look, if it’s worth building, it’s definitely worth building when stuff — labor, materials, etc. — is cheap. I get that. But the decision over which kinds of infrastructure to build is actually a live political debate, and spending the money sprucing up airports is not the right, which is to say the most sustainable, way to spend it.