We as a society have somehow agreed that competition is the best thing for progress. That the best option is always the one that wins the popular vote which leaves the loser being left to the trash bin where they belong. Anyone who remembers their high school hierarchy knows that the coolest kids, the ones that always got the popular vote, typically stagnated into mundanity. If you wanted the top spot you have to work hard and fight for it. Usually following some obscure guideline of ‘how to be cool’ which ends up creating duplicates of the same thing. Movies, stories, pop culture, all these things promote the idea that there is a set way to be and if you don’t follow then you are in another group – another tribe. We are told that competition is good for us and then that lesson is reinforced by the world as a repeating record. What would happen if we changed the value of competition from being a win or lose game to a win or win game?
Before I go on it should be said that there are many people that say all of these things much more eloquently than me. Here is a great interview on competition:
I have to stress that the way competition is taught in any economics class is that it is a dichotomy. People or groups are competing for the same goal leaving only one to win: Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, Minidisc vs. CD, even Man vs. Woman. Many sides, each have their own pros and cons yet only one can win. Why is this? Do we need to have only one in the end or can’t we just have all the options? Some say it comes down to money and the consumer – yes the man vs. woman argument is also about consumers – while I would argue that it is always about self worth. Those that win in capitalistic competition go on to do more while those that lose have a choice, pick yourself up and try again or give up. Most tend to stay in the safe zone of capitalism with ‘safe’ jobs and guaranteed pensions. The only guarantee that capitalism can give is that someone wants what you have. Even if that person has more than most they will always have the opportunity to grab more. There are those that say pensions are not going to be around much longer and this is all dependant on the sustainability of the middle class.
If we look at The Poor then we can easily say that the percentage of poverty in the world has decreased. This is a good thing and should be praised but not overlooked for what it is. Maybe acknowledging that the rise in scientific understanding and technological abilities have created wealth where there was none before. Giving people with no clean water and sanitation access to those things for very cheap. That’s what progress can create and I commend this. A huge negative force on the elimination of poverty is the growth of wealth for the top 0.1% of the world while the middle class and lower class stagnate and loose. The gap of wealth has grown to be as large as it has been since the great depression – making the prospect of a major crash a possibility… guarantee if you consider other factors. What would happen if we created a maximum wealth model that restricted the amount of personal wealth? The billionaires that like to hold onto their money for whatever strange reason they have would then forfeit it to fund projects that support the lowest earners in the world. This wouldn’t stop people from earning an obscene amount of money, it would instead restrict the greed and hoarding that we see with most of the top 1%. An example I typically give is having a limit on how much you can earn in a year, possibly $200 million as an arbitrary number. This could be higher or lower and just serves to give reference. If you earn less than you will have that goal to reach each year, creating the classic competition model. If you earn more than that then your accounts and further earnings are removed until the next years reset. At no time would you have more than $200 million in access, meaning if the cycle reset each year and you still have that in your accounts then you would still not earn more. Any earnings beyond the limit would go into social programs determined by society. This simply idea would spread the wealth to the world in a much more sustainable way while maintaining the capitalist competition model. Anyone that says this is too small has no real idea of how far this amount of money actually goes. You could buy a $190 million dollar yacht one year and the next year earn back your $190 million until you reach the cap in your personal wealth. When I hear someone say that they want to be a billionaire it makes me wonder how much empathy for other human beings they have. If the next thing they say is how they will help the world with that money then we have a different story. The good news right now is that the richer you are tends to make you more depressed and miserable.
If you are saying Philanthropy in your mind right now, let’s just say that it is a farce. Philanthropy only exists as a title for people with extreme wealth that share a small fraction of their earnings. No one actually creates billions of dollars of value into their work, it is just that they have the rights to something that everyone wants to use. I wrote about this earlier in regards to medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.
Looking at the Pros and Cons of competition, when we study competition in economics and political science it is viewed through the lens of perfect competition. With a capitalistic society that attests to hard work as the driving force of progress the only way to actually calculate competition is in it’s purest form.
Pros – simply to understand given that the world is viewed as a static place. Animals fight for food and breeding rights as an example of a very simplified view of competition. The same sense is applied to humans in a capitalistic society. Political stability is also considered part of the pro argument. Yet with the current circus in politics around the world we have little doubt that the view of competition in this light is very flawed.
Cons – the world is dynamic in it’s nature and so are human beings. Considering competition as an absolute ignores reality, which leaves anyone saying that competition is good for human beings as being wrong. Those that work and live in a hyper competitive environment such as the stock market or sports can fully understand how detrimental it is to the human psyche. This erodes at the sense of safety that human beings require in our social senses and creates people that are hindered in many capacities that have always been necessary; such as empathy, compassion, love, and sympathy. Human beings are tribal, yet the extreme individuality that is built into capitalism through competition goes against the social capacities that we have evolved. Another addition is the loss of personal value that is instantly held at the forefront of our identity when we lose to competition. Those that work in finance know that when a loss in wealth occurs that person views themselves as less of a human being compared to others that have gained wealth. Obviously this is false, yet we put social value into those that have monetary value.
Some say human Greed and Envy are already part of that calculation simply because the capitalist society works in the human realm, yet it is hard to actually make that link work. This is because humans have a wide variance of greed and envy and to quantify it into a calculation that is based in absolute values would need to have an absolute value of greed and envy. Maybe read that last sentence again. Human beings evolved to be a part of a tribe. If you are a die-hard sports fan then you are an example of tribalism. It isn’t a bad quality and also isn’t a good one. Like the pros and cons there are many sides to each argument. I am a die-hard follower of this youtube channel: The School of Life
When we give Value to money we degrade the value of ourselves. It is important to value money yet remember that it is a one way street. Just because you have it does not mean you are worth more as a human being than anyone else. Human value is truly simple, it is how we treat others in comparison to ourselves. This concept comes from before any religion claimed it’s valour, before commerce and the idea of money as a trading resource. Human value is in your tribal nature. If your tribe succeeds and lives long prosperous lives then your value is held higher. We have leaders and heroes, all of whom are good or bad in hindsight. Our value is knocked down when we allow negative and diabolical people to lead us. We are now one planet sized tribe with the aspect of communication and the internet. No one on Earth should be left out of the loop and there are no more countries if we consider our ability to travel and communicate with anywhere and anyone. Old traits of society are quickly dismissed as technology advances. Why would we allow a select few to hold claim over our resources? They claim it is all in the name of capitalism or birth right, yet I did not agree to any of this. I was born the same way you and they were, I have struggled to get an education and a quality job, I am always looking for opportunities to create a better life for myself and those that I love, yet my hard work doesn’t pay as much as them. I am currently working on new technology and ideas that can help the world become a better place while I am also concerned that the things I create will be taken from me by people with more money, simply because they can afford a lawyer to bend the rules in their favour.
To me the concept of Capitalism is wonderful on paper in the same way that Communism is. The moment we add Human beings into the equation those pure concepts of equality turn into mechanisms of greed and envy. Currently Communism is looked at as a failed economic model; one that started with the same fervour and enthusiasm as Capitalism. I contend that the future will see Capitalism in the same light as other failed economic theories. It works for a little bit and then a select few find holes to exploit. Competition is part of nature and will not disappear with another economic model. We should however try to remove the detrimental effects of competition because all that we have in the end is each other.
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