The trap of compulsory competition

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One of the ideologies of the free market is that competition is good. That competition leads to striving, excellence and efficiency. Competition can focus the mind, but in my personal experience collaboration also has a motivating effect. A colleague wanting to stay late at work to get our joint project just that bit more perfect can motivate me to put the hours in just as much as the worry that someone else might get there before me. Personally, I usually find the collaborative egging on brings me more joy and pleasure and energy, whereas the competitive frame creates anxiety.

Our current economic system in the UK has dogmatically implemented compulsory competition at every level of the public sector. Local authorities must compete with each other to get funding from central government to carry out basic things like investing in cycle and bus infrastructure, invest in the local economy, or insulate houses (Fransham et al. 2023). These are activities where those who are least resourced to put together a compelling bid probably have the most need for funding.

In the third sector, charities and community organisations with a shared mission must compete for small pots of funding. Many people working in this sector want to collaborate, knowing that the social and environmental problems they are addressing are much too big for their organisation to tackle alone. But the need to compete for funding is always in the back of people’s minds, and fully open sharing of experience, tools, practices and ideas carries a risk of losing that competitive edge.

Big corporations, on the other hand, are able to create a large internal space within which there is no compulsory competition. They can work as one organism of multiple cells, each serving their own function in interdependence. There may be moments of competition, but the organisation can choose to both collaborate and compete internally in ways that suit its purpose - rather than being imposed externally by funders.

When politicians state a goal of a ‘competitive economy’, what this actually means is the goal is to win. For the country to be somewhere that is desirable enough for investment etc compared to the competition. To paraphrase former president Donald Trump, to be a winner, not a loser.

Over the last several decades, the mainstream of biology has increasingly recognised the huge amount of co-operation in ecosystems. This enriches the neo-darwinistic view that competition and violence rules the natural world. Given that human understandings of nature are often projections of cultural biases of the society making the observations, perhaps this bodes well for a more co-operatively oriented society. However, perhaps this time it is biology leading the way for political and economic systems to shift.

Reference

Mark Fransham, Max Herbertson, Mihaela Pop, Margarida Bandeira Morais & Neil Lee (2023) Level best? The levelling up agenda and UK regional inequality, Regional Studies, 57:11, 2339-2352, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2022.2159356