Educational Policy: Egalitarian or Elitist?

This paper uses a general‐equilibrium model of production and predation to explain observed differences across countries in educational policies. This model predicts, in accord with the facts, that countries in which the government is willing and able to enforce a collective choice to allocate resources to guarding against predators choose to have egalitarian educational policies, which serve to decrease the amount of guarding required to deter predation. In contrast, countries in which individual producers, or small subsets of producers, choose the amount of resources to allocate to guarding against predators, taking the ratio of predators to producers as given, choose to have elitist educational policies, which can serve to decrease the number of potential predators.