Economic Competition

Economists toss around the notion that competition is good, but where does competition end and cooperation begin? Eventually the global economy becomes so uniform that the bases of competition can no longer be readily manipulated.

Even now, competition hurts many to benefit some. Consumers of a product or service may benefit when they receive it at a lower price, but this often puts a serious pinch on the people asked to provide the benefit at a price low enough to ace out the competition. The item in question then gets provided by a series of suicides, who try to make it work on such slim margins that they end up going under, one after another, or the consumer has to get used to paying more, unless the item is simple enough that an endless string of failing, under-compensated providers can produce it. This assumes anyone is stupid enough to keep at it.

At some point, everyone in the world will know that there’s more to life than toiling for a pittance, because every economy so far has produced its privileged ones, who claim more for their services and take more leisure as their due. Fans of the American management class like to say that American labor priced itself out of the market, and that unionized American workers are a bunch of greedy slackers. Greedy slackers they may be, but that model has been held up to them as a success since before the beginning of American industrialization. After all, who is schmoozing in the boardrooms and dotting the golf courses and yacht clubs of the world?

The American Dream has not been to have any particular thing, but simply to have more and better than one has at the moment. It can be done. Look at that guy over there. He’s doing it right now. I want some of that.

Competition without rules leads to warring princely states. But rules do not guarantee a clean or universally beneficial game. People cheat, or write the rules to favor themselves or their causes, or simply overlook something. In economy and ecology, we always manage to overlook some critical detail, some butterfly that flaps its wings and throws the whole system out of our control.

As long as the model for economic success is competition, it will be acceptable for powerful individuals and sub-groups to take control of a disproportionate share of resources.

Competition is natural. But we live so far from purely natural actions that we can’t compete as all other life forms compete. We have to examine how our exaggerated efficiency in one area can actually lead to our downfall overall. Infant mortality is down. Survival is up in general. People live longer. Lo and behold, we have a population problem. We can dig resources out of the earth with massive mechanized equipment and refine raw materials in cleverly designed factories. Unfortunately, these factories belch and spew foul byproducts across the machine-scarred landscape.

We can compete with each other not only through the medium of money, indirectly deteriorating each other’s lives by destabilizing currencies and taking our business elsewhere, but directly, through our war machines. Oh, but war machines have gotten so effective that we risk destroying too much, or getting attacked by enemies who have developed their own fearful engines of destruction.

Natural competitors act locally. They don’t think globally, because they don’t think at all. Trees grow, and shade each other out. Their leaves fall beneath them, recycling material back into their own structure, and into that of their seedlings. If some species grows faster, it reaches the light and dominates. Then species life span controls how long that type will rule.

Animals follow their various methods, grazing, hunting, scavenging or as parasites. They don’t make moral judgements.

Eden was a state of mind. The legend says that Adam and Eve ate of the tree that gave them knowledge of good and evil. That knowledge has only been a burden. Whether you believe the myth as written or think it is simply a written version of a wistful oral tradition handed down by apes who pined for simpler times, the fact remains that we know better. Generation by generation we know better and better, how the actions of one entity can influence many others, and how even the insignificant striving of anonymous individuals can add up to a happy society or a locust plague.