competition
(posted on 2007-07-19 07:00:04)
Competition is worshipped in some circles as a way of improving the world. As someone who's studied biology I always find this idea a bit bizarre. Competition in nature is like disease or death: omnipresent, sure, but not something you'd encourage.
Here's how competition produces an "advance" in nature. You have a population with some characteristic, for example height or strength, which varies among individuals in the population. You arrange for a competition in which the individual with the optimal value of that characteristic lives and breeds, while the other individuals are killed. Depending on the species, the method of competition is either fighting or competitive resource holding that starves others. After the slaughter and unequal breeding, the next generation of the population will have an average value for the characteristic similar to the individual who won the competition - not through magic, the next generation is the offspring of the winner. Biologists don't consider evolutionary changes to be advances - they're just changes. Evolution through natural selection is great if you're enthusiastic about the peacock's tail or the giraffe's neck, but it's a pretty grim way to make changes in human society.
The basic idea behind all the systems of ethics that arose during the past few thousand years is to reward those who are good to others, rather than those who are bad. (Ethics that are exceptions to this usually disappear when enough people find them disgusting.) This simple human invention renounces the "law of the jungle", spreads cooperation throughout the community, and makes everyone better off. So why the current fad for competition as a principle of governance? The problem comes to us from economics, the world-view / uni-degree of the rich and famous. Models of competition drawn from economics textbook are too simple to model human reality effectively and are little more than slogans.
Simplistic economics says something like this: Assume there are several companies that make a product. It's good for society if the price of the product goes down. We therefore arrange that the vendors compete. We only buy from the "winning" vendor, and the others are forced to lower their prices too. If they can't, they go out of business. Some economists would have us believe that this process produced all of the world's advances in technology, transport, energy and so on (some of these "advances" already look ironic). What this model leaves out is the effects of competition other than price movement. What did the companies do to lower their prices? Think really hard and invent something? Not usually - examples like that are the pinups for competition but are rare in practice. In the normal course of events, companies compete by minimizing wages, lowering the number of people they employ, lowering the safety standards of employees and customers, spending money on advertising and lawsuits, and using cheaper, environmentally harmful production and transport methods. And when companies compete by doing this, their suppliers, employees and peers are forced to do it too. Everyone's life is made worse. Governments enact minimum wage and safety legislation to reduce the unsavoury side-effects of economic competition, but without addressing the root cause, all this achieves is that the winners are now those companies that move their operations to countries without the legislation. Our manly "competition" looks more like laziness when it means that all our work is being done by people living in dictatorships and treated in ways that we would not tolerate. Meanwhile McJobs and semi-employment become the norm in the West and we depend for our necessities on problematic international trade and transport systems. Who is winning in this scenario?
A bizarre example of competition-worship is the privatization of public utilities. It took our society a long time to build electricity, water, transport and communication infrastructure, and they are essential - we're not talking iPod covers here. The way in which utilities are run has consequences for society beyond merely the price at which their products sell - environmental impact is an obvious example. And the competition we get when utilities privatize is phony. Utilities are inherently monopolistic, because it would be silly to build several duplicate copies of railroads, water pipes, electricity cables etc. The new private utilities don't build new, better infrastructure, they just rent out the one the old community-owned utility was forced to give them. That's not competition, it's a tarted-up assets sale, which governments hope voters will forget in time for the proceeds to look good on the next budget.
Enthusiasts of economic competition are phonies. Big business doesn't compete in the "nature red in tooth and claw" way that wannabe-macho economists would like you to think they're straining at the leash to get amongst. They depend on a legal system that stops the kinds of competition corporations don't want, for example poor people stealing from them. Competition in general doesn't favour those who are competing - the average might rise but individuals still just occupy a place in the variance. Competition benefits those who extract a benefit from the higher average - think farmers and cattle, bosses and workers, teachers and students etc. The theory of natural selection is a marvellous piece of science which explains how the natural world, including us, came to be. But if it has any relevance for the running of a human society, workplace, educational institution or whatever, it's as an illustration of what to avoid.
reply 1 from Andrew: Belief in the "free market" is to me very religious, replacing the orderly hierarchy of God with the Hobbes-ian social free-for-all of Mammon. It's a faith that withers when held up to the light of rational explanation, but is held onto anyway like any other faith. Hardcore capitalists, those inspired by Rand etc., do geuniunely believe in abolishing any government restrictions on business, but as you've pointed out, would not tolerate any real "competition" from any other source: ie organised workers. For that, they all fall back on the Big Brother govt. they despise to sort out their altercations.
reply 2 from Indifference Engine: When Marx predicted, in the 19th century, that competitive capitalism would lead to a steady decline in workers’ living conditions, he at least had the excuse of a small data set. But in the early 21st century, if you want to defend this theory, you need to explain why mortality rates have declined, life expectancy has been extended, famine is unknown (except in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, in which living conditions are influenced more by tribal warfare and displaced populations than by wage competition) and access to consumer goods, transportation and communications technology has advanced to levels that would have been incomprehensible to the isolated proletarians scrabbling for their next loaf of stale bread in Marx' day. Please explain why the standard of living has improved.
reply 3 from IE: PS I readily accept that Darwinistic evolutionary 'competition' is an inapt analogy for economic competition. For one thing, companies can adjust to circumstances rather than just dying like a short giraffe. For another, economics is a descriptive discipline that defines increasing prosperity as a 'good' to be advanced by competition, whereas evolutionary biology is a descriptive theory that does not differentiate between survival-reproduction and competitiveness (fitness).
reply 4 from Greg: Good point IE, but I'd reply that most of the technical advances and infrastructure development that improved our standard of living were carried out (or at least funded by) governments and semi-government bodies. Even when private companies innovate, it only happens within a framework of governance. I'm not trying to be a flag-waving radical, and I don't hate free enterprise, but I do question the way recent governments have (a) sold the infrastructure built by previous governments, and (b) deregulated everything. (A) is done to give the false impression of a balanced budget, while (b) seems to the exercise of ideology for no gain. Both are justified as promoting "competition", as though it were a tenet of religious faith.
reply 5 from James Earthenware: This has to be one of the best essays I have ever read. I love what you are saying, and it's what I was trying to say with my song "Artificial Selection", that the criteria for selection in our society is no longer based on "nature / fitness" but more based on "arbitrary criteria / wealth accumulation" which means a whole lot of really unfit people are propagating, not only themselves, but also their religious like beliefs in the "free market".
In regard to indifference engine, living longer is not a measure of "quality" of life. Prolonging misery I would call it.
Most innovation comes either from war / space program related (government funded) or entrepreneurial (worker funded) activities. Entrepreneurs borrow money to develop the technology, but have no money to market it, so they go broke/bankrupt. Corporations then buy this technology and mass-produce it and market it, and make billions of dollars in profits. None of this money is ever returned to the governments or inventors of the innovations. Mainly because corporations are able to operate in a manner that avoids paying taxes.
My fave part of the essay, is how you correctly identify all the fake-macho / wild-animal posturing that exists in these economic / neo-con theories. These people are the weakest, most detached /insulated from nature and least manly of all our species, and perhaps their love of aggressive / competitive / macho ideology has a lot to do with their personal insecurities or small penis sizes. A lot more should be written on this topic.
I also agree that using "average" wages is another false measure of "improvement", because of this increased "average", food prices, house prices etc have all skyrocketed, but then everybody I know is still earning minimum wage, which hasn't increased at all. Increasing averages does not mean prosperity for all, it means a greater divide between rich and poor, adjusted mathematically to give the impression that everyone has benefited. It's a complete sham.
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