Education, efficacité économique et justice sociale : une approche rawlsienne

We consider a model of education planning in an economy in which agents differ in their costs of acquiring education. The agent?s cost parameter, called ?handicap? is not observed. The planner is endowed with a fixed sum of money, with which two types of transfer can be made: in cash and in kind. The planner can finance transfers in kind, called ?help?, by means of schooling expenditures, which reduce the agent?s education cost. The planner seeks to maximize a social welfare function which is a CES index of utility levels. We study the optimal allocation of individual education effort, schooling expenditures (help), and cash, under the self-selection and budget constraints. Assuming that the set of types is finite, and that help and effort are sufficiently substitutable, we find that individual education investment levels are a decreasing function, and help is an increasing function of handicap. Utility levels cannot be equalized because of self-selection constraints. More social aversion for inequality unequivocally leads to more inequality of educational achievements, and to more assistance through redistribution. This remains true in the limit, under strictly egalitarian (or Rawlsian) preferences of the principal. We discuss the origin of this apparent paradox and the concepts used in the analysis, trying to relate them to John Rawls?s philosophy of Justice.