No Contest

by Alfie Kohn

  The first shift in perspective—from considering what benefits me to what benefits the group—entails seeing most of Western political science and economics as fundamentally misconceived. Adam Smith asserted that when each person endeavored to further his or her best interests, each person gained. To someone who has rejected an individualist ethic, this proposition rests on a faulty assumption—namely, the a priori belief that our analysis should be based on the solitary actor. The second, more moderate shift in perspective—which leaves our worldview similar to Smith’s but offers a long-range view—leads us to conclude that the prime theorist of capitalism was simply wrong. Everyone does not benefit when we struggle against each other for private gain. It is a simple matter of examining the evidence. To distinguish between what is rational for the individual and what is rational for the group is finally misleading because the former is “not rational, period. It is damaging not just to the group, but to the individual.”88

  But even this modest conclusion seems radical in light of our current zero-sum mentality. Having thoroughly assimilated the attitude that the better I do, the worse you do (and vice versa), we are not open to mutually advantageous agreement or cooperation of any kind. The costs can be high. The nightmarish problems now facing Mexico City, for example, are explained by its mayor as follows: “With our attitude in the past and perhaps also in the present, we have disordered this city because we have put individual interests before the collective interest.”89 Similarly, although nuclear war benefits no one, some Americans take Soviet endorsement of any arms control agreement as sufficient reason to oppose it: if it’s in their interest, it automatically must be against our interest. The enormous potential in mutual benefit (cooperative) strategies will not be tapped—or even understood—until we broaden our perspective beyond the narrow prejudice that we always do best by trying to beat others.

  ECONOMIC COMPETITION

  In considering the social features of productivity, this chapter already has broached the matter of economic competition. This is a subject almost impossible to avoid in the course of exploring the effects of competition in our culture—particularly inasmuch as our economic system may well be the prototype of competition from which other varieties derive.90 Capitalism can be thought of as the heart of competitiveness in American society.

  Interestingly, most critics of capitalism are concerned not so much with the competitive basis of the system as with the fact that this competition is, in practice, unfair. Surely this criticism is well earned: it is a curious race indeed in which one competitor must try to scramble up from poverty while another starts out with a huge trust fund. A multinational corporation, similarly, has the capital and the tax advantages that allow it to trounce—or simply acquire—a small competitor. Once a business becomes large enough (e.g., Chrysler, Lockheed, Continental Bank), it simply cannot be allowed to fail. The result is that most sectors of the economy are becoming ever more concentrated, with a handful of concerns controlling the lion’s share of business. Other profound inequities exist in an economy whose competition is so grossly unfair—or, to use the euphemism of choice, “imperfect.” More than half of the largest 250 corporations paid no taxes (or received rebates) in at least one of three years in the mid-1980s,91 while forty to fifty million Americans live in poverty.92

  Despite the enormous discrepancy between perfect competition and the actual state of our economic system, competition is still the stated ideal. Businesspeople and public officials use the term as an honorific, discussing ways in which they can make their companies and countries “more competitive” and never pausing to ask whether a competitive system really is the best possible arrangement. Even progressive thinkers have come to identify true competition as the (rarely realized) ideal and cooperation, manifested as collusion, price fixing, and so on, as the salient evil.

  When critics see things this way, they do not mean to repudiate genuine cooperation; they are simply accepting (often unconsciously) the premises and vocabulary of corporate capitalism. Within this framework, the word cooperation signifies little more than violation of antitrust laws. But critics of our economic system have, I think, made a serious mistake in accepting competition as a theoretical good and directing their energies to the question of how best to attain it. This not only has a stultifying effect on the discussion of economic issues; it spills over into other realms. Competition becomes generally identified as desirable and alternatives are regarded with suspicion when they are regarded at all. We need to develop a critique that will question the productiveness of competition itself and not simply assume that we are going about it in the wrong way. The following discussion will take this tack, although it will not provide anything like a comprehensive critique. It will simply raise a few questions about the value of a competitive economic system.

  ***

  Economics is the study of how commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Most economists see their job as finding the most efficient means of satisfying demand for these commodities. Competition is justified on the grounds of its putative efficiency and, further, its usefulness at stimulating growth. The first question one could ask—although in practice almost no one does—is whether economic growth is always desirable. Paul Wachtel, in his book The Poverty of Affluence, shows how such growth entails significant costs to our health and safety, makes our working lives unhappy (for all we might gain in quality of life as consumers, we lose as producers), fails to bring about greater equity, and actually represents a desperate and futile attempt to compensate for psychological and social deficiencies.93

  But let us assume for the sake of the argument that producing more goods is a legitimate goal. Does a competitive system represent the best way to meet this goal? We have considerable reason to doubt that it does.

  • Working to maximize individual gain by competing against others can be counterproductive in the long run, as the last section suggested.

  • The evidence already reviewed from Robert Helmreich demonstrates that competitiveness does not make people more productive—even when productivity is measured by a businessman’s earnings. Other data confirm that structural competition promotes achievement less well than cooperation in a variety of settings. The obvious question is why this should suddenly cease to be the case when we turn our attention to the economic system as a whole.

  • At least one study has found that competitive behavior appears more frequently and more vigorously on the part of children with lower socioeconomic origins.94 We should be cautious in interpreting this finding: it may be that competition is a socialized response to poverty, an attempt (however misguided) to improve one’s condition. Alternatively, it may reflect the fact that competition appears to be particularly stressed in lower-income schools.95 But such a finding, considered alongside Helmreich’s, suggests that competition may just be counterproductive.

  • Margaret Mead’s cross-cultural studies led her to conclude that cooperation is more effective than competition at maximizing production. A more recent review of the research forced Roderic Gorney to acknowledge that achievement on the part of a society did not depend on its competitiveness (see [>]).

  The case for the desirability of economic competition is usually made as a result of assumptions about scarcity. Mead emphasizes that it is cultural norms and not objective scarcity that determine whether a society’s economic system is competitive, but one could still argue that competition is the best arrangement for dealing with scarcity. The subject deserves attention.

  By “scarcity,” most of us mean that goods are in short supply: there isn’t enough of something to go around. While there often is no clear-cut understanding of what constitutes “enough,” the simple fact is that there is more than sufficient food to sustain everyone on the planet.96 The same is true of land and renewable energy. The important question, then, is why the staples of life are so egregiously maldistributed—why, for example, the United States, with a little more than 5 percent of the world’
s population, uses something like 40 percent of the world’s resources. What appears to be a problem of scarcity usually turns out, on closer inspection, to be a problem of distribution. But mainstream economists are notably unconcerned with distributional issues: they talk only about whether a given system is productive or efficient, and it is up to us to ask, “For whom?” A high gross national product tells us nothing about who has access to the goods; likewise, the absence of goods on the part of particular individuals or nations raises the question of whether someone else has a surfeit.

  The point is this: if there is enough of the necessities to go around but they are not going around, the debate must shift to the impact of competition on matters of distribution. Can the inequities be blamed on competition itself? Even if not, the key question is whether more competition would rectify the situation. It is hard to imagine how it could. Whoever has more resources is far more likely to win a contest, thus giving her even more resources for the next contest, and so on until the opponent is utterly vanquished or someone steps in to stop the competition. Government regulations and income transfer mechanisms—which free-market apologists correctly identify as limitations on pure competition—are all that prevent inequities even more pronounced than those now in existence. To take another kind of evidence, Gorney demonstrated a significant correlation between competition in a culture and the presence of sharply delineated “have” and “have-not” groups (see [>]). On whatever grounds competition might be defended, equity simply cannot be considered one of its benefits. Thus it would seem to be precisely the wrong strategy for dealing with the maldistribution of goods, which is perhaps the most critical economic reality to be addressed.

  When economists talk about scarcity, however, they generally are not using the word to mean that goods are in short supply. Their technical use of the term refers instead to (1) the fact that choosing one commodity involves giving up the chance to have another, or (2) the presumed failure of people to be satisfied regardless of how much they have. Let us take these in turn.

  The first usage defines a scarce good as one for which a consumer would give up something else. Scarcity, then, concerns the mutually exclusive relationship between commodities. This may be a useful way of looking at the world in some respects, but it tells us nothing about the absolute status of a given commodity. The model is set up so all finite goods will always be considered “scarce”; the availability of each is being evaluated vis-à-vis the others. By definition, no economic system can remedy this state of affairs, so competition is no more sensible a way to deal with scarcity than any other arrangement.

  The second definition rests economic theory on a very questionable (but rarely questioned) assumption about “human nature”—namely, the belief that we will always want more of something than we had before or more than the next person has. Far more reasonable is the proposition that insatiability and competitiveness reflect cultural mores. As Wachtel saw, “Our obsession with growth is the expression of neither inexorable laws of human nature nor inexorable laws of economics. . . . It is a cultural and psychological phenomenon, reflecting our present way of organizing and giving meaning to our lives . . . [that] is now maladaptive.”97

  This position defines scarcity as a matter of psychological state (perception or desire) rather than objective fact. Some social critics have gone along with this approach but have shown that this state, which is often used to justify competition, actually is a product of competition. Specifically, it is argued, capitalism manufactures scarcity.98 Capitalism’s driving force is the quest for profits; its alleged success at satisfying human needs is merely a fortuitous by-product. This goal requires the continuous—indeed, constantly expanding—consumption of goods, and these goods will be purchased only if they are desired. The advertising industry exists to create this desire, to produce a continual dissatisfaction with what we currently have and to tell us of the fulfillment that purchasing yet another product will bring.* We must be “educated” as to the desirability of low-calorie TV dinners, cordless telephones, and this year’s model of video recorders. The sociologist Philip Slater has written lucidly on this topic, and he is worth quoting at length:

  Scarcity is spurious. . . . It now exists only for the purpose of maintaining the system that depends upon it, and its artificiality becomes more palpable each day. . . . Inequality, originally a consequence of scarcity, is now a means of creating artificial scarcities. For in the old culture [the dominant disposition of American life], as we have seen, the manufacture of scarcity is the principal activity. Hostile comments of old-culture adherents toward new-culture forms (“people won’t want to work if they can get things for nothing,” “people won’t want to get married if they can get it free”) often reveal this preoccupation. Scarcity, the presumably undesired but unavoidable foundation for the whole old-culture edifice, has now become its most treasured and sacred value, and to maintain this value in the midst of plenty it has been necessary to establish invidiousness as the foremost criterion of worth. Old-culture Americans . . . find it difficult to enjoy anything they themselves have unless they can be sure that there are people to whom this pleasure is denied. . . . Since the society rests on scarcity assumptions, involvement in it has always meant competitive involvement.”99

  A competitive economic system offers itself as the best way to deal with scarcity (here defined as the inability of consumers to get enough) while quietly promoting scarcity. The result is the perpetuation of the system and, not incidentally, the encouragement of intentional competition. Capitalism works on the same principle as a glass company whose employees spend their nights breaking people’s windows and their days boasting of the public service they provide.

  Manufactured scarcity, of course, is not limited to economic matters. Every contest that is staged (the most facts memorized, the fastest runner, the most beautiful) involves the creation of a desired and scarce status where none existed before. Social psychologist Emmy Pepitone emphasizes the artificiality of this status:

  There seem to be exceedingly few essential objects that are so unique that they can be possessed only by one person. In the state of nature, most objects come in a form that can be shared by a large number of people. . . . Uniqueness seems to be invented by humans, who invent activities deliberately designed to allow entry into the goal region to one individual only.100

  This process can occur even without formal contests. Charles Derber, for example, has described at some length the competition for attention in a conversation. “While attention is not intrinsically ‘scarce,’” he argues, “it tends to become so under . . . individualistic conditions of allocation and distribution.”101 To ask whom I listen to or care for the most is to turn attention or love into a finite commodity.

  To return to economics, neither a specialized nor a commonsense definition of scarcity leads us to accept competition as the most rational or appropriate system. If we view scarcity as a function of expanding human desire, this situation is largely created by the very system recommended to us as its solution. If we view scarcity as a situation of objective insufficiency, then the real problem turns out to be one of distribution—something that competition is more likely to exacerbate than remedy. In any case, the assumption that a competitive economic system is productive presupposes that competition stimulates optimal performance—something we now know to be false.

  ***

  If any benefits can still be claimed for economic competition, they must be weighed—as any economist should insist on principle—against the disadvantages. The psychological and interpersonal costs of competition, per se, will be discussed in later chapters, but there are some unique problems with competition in the economic sphere that should be sketched here. I have already suggested that competition may contribute to an inequitable distribution of resources. But there is also the matter of its failure with respect to the standards favored by economists: competition may be unsuccessful even on its own terms.

  In 1940, Lawr
ence Frank listed some of the costs of economic competition. He included business failures, copious litigation, idle equipment, a reduction in quality, unsafe working conditions, and the need to regulate the private sector in order to keep all of these problems under control.102 These problems were experienced most dramatically in the laissez-faire economy of the last century, which, according to economist John Culbertson, “performed badly, provoking general demands for reform and regulation. The country’s ‘production miracle’ occurred in the Second World War, under the wartime economic controls.”103

  When regulation is cut back in order to bring more competition 10 the marketplace, we again witness the true consequences of this competition: its advantages often prove illusory or short-lived or selective. A few examples:

  • The recent deregulation of the airline industry, has, it is true, led to lower fares on busy routes (e.g., New York to Los Angeles), but service to less heavily traveled cities is either much more expensive or no longer available.104 Precisely the same thing happened when bus companies were able to compete without regulation: they “cut out less-profitable routes, and the cheap service that the young, the elderly and the poor have historically depended on [was] less available.”105