In Chapter 12, the optimal properties of contests from a social perspective are outlined. It presents three main criteria for evaluating contests from a social welfare standpoint by considering the total effort, average effort, and effort of the contest winner. Additionally, the chapter delves into the discussion of how to organize different simultaneous contests and how free entry in several exclusive contests leads to social welfare maximization. Furthermore, the chapter examines the social optimality of aggregating local contests –limited to participants from specific areas, like EU countries – into a larger, open contest, such as one based in Brussels. Finally, the chapter provides a new perspective on two significant issues, compulsory education and affirmative action, by illustrating how active public policies can improve social welfare.

In 1814, Denmark created a public primary school system, but Britain only developed private church schools. This chapter recounts the struggles over education in the decades surrounding 1800 and the role of authors in these battles. Writers’ literary tropes fostered distinctive perceptions of education in the two countries: Danish enlightenment writers portrayed education for workers as necessary for building a strong society, vibrant economy, and secure state. Many British authors worried that mass schooling would foster instability and overpopulation. But in both countries, some writers participated as activists in the campaigns for education. In Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1808 lecture on education was credited with launching the mass education movement. Coleridge, William Wordsworth Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, and others resisted a national education system and promoted the Bell monitorial model (espoused by the Anglican National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor. In Denmark, Ludvig Holberg bequeathed his fortune to the Sorø Academy (which educated future political statesmen) and encouraged the school to adopt his enlightened ideas about education. Later Danish Romantic writers helped a progressive coalition supporting the crown prince to advance mass schooling and to resist challenges from reactionary estate owners.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.