It's Not a Competition

We in America have very much bought into the concept of Economic Darwinism; we're rightly a bit uncomfortable with the idea that everyone should struggle against everyone else so that only the strong survive, and we at least are a little squeamish about acknowledging this reality within our social lives, but we never hesitate to see it flourish in our entire capitalist system.  We apply competition as a filter in nearly everything we do - the assumption is that if you eat at a restaurant, they have to give you quality service, because otherwise there are other restaurants you can eat at.  And the same logic is extended to the house you buy, the car you drive, the computer you play Angry Birds on, where you work, which university you attend, and even which multinational corporations expand into new markets while others collapse into bankruptcy or government bailout.  We as a culture simply assume that if everyone is contesting for supremacy, they will all do their best work, and we will reap rich fruits from their contest no matter which one wins.  The trouble is, though, this doesn't actually work to any real extent, for a wide variety of reasons.

The biggest of these reasons is that competition doesn't just allow two participants to try and out-excel each other; it also enables them to directly attack one another, undercutting their rival's efforts anytime it would be more cost-effective than boosting their own.  This is most visible in our political process - rather than explaining why you should vote for him, each candidate will simply explain why you should vote against his opponent.  Elsewhere, corporate espionage is a multi-billion dollar industry; one company assumes all the costs and risks of developing a new technology, while another simply waltzes in and steals the plans while sabotaging the prototype, potentially being the first to patent the invention as long as they can destroy all the evidence of their thievery.  It doesn't matter whether this only happens on rare occasions; the very fact that it's possible demonstrates that our system's foundational assumption is invalid.  It's possible to win a competition without actually being the fittest (unless of course your definition of fitness is very broad indeed, which might work for Nature, but is pretty incompatible with just about every human attempt at a system of ethics.)

There are other issues that can prevent a competition from being strictly a race to the high-water mark, but I'm not in the mood to sit here and list them all, so I'll just wrap it up by saying this: as long as companies are solely concerned with the bottom line, they have a great many strategies available to them, and being actually good at what they do is only one of these options, not necessarily the one that's most likely to work or that they're most interested in attempting.  I have a huge problem with that fact.