TASK: Discuss your personal  idea of competition also with reference to what you have been studying so far also with reference to the documents below.

Competition Is Not For Everyone   

         Competition is part of everyone’s life whether we are aware of it or not: children compete in playing, teenagers compete against themselves to be considered, adults compete to gain a promotion and old people often compete against time. Nature itself has to compete in order to survive.

C. Darwin’s theory is based on Natural selection, which means competition among species. Actually competition in life, competition in nature and economical competition are pretty similar. They all involve a struggle between different parts, which determines a winner and some losers.

The winner is considered to be the best, the only one able to be successful.

Considering the role of competition in Economic Science, wisegeek.com states it is the fundamental concept of Capitalism; cooperation is, in contrast, the base of Socialism. On one hand capitalistic society awards individualism, on the other hand Socialism promotes communities and alliances. Indeed, in capitalism privates own monetary resources and  “everyone works for his own wealth”, whereas in socialism everyone works for an equally distributed wealth.

In my opinion competition is potentially more productive than cooperation because I do believe in the strength of individuals. Take for instance the sentence “Only the genius can see some crazy ideas are made of gold”, taken from “How Steve Jobs changed capitalism” in The Guardian, October 6th, 2011. It honors the power of a single. In addition good competition allows challenges between parts and challenges secure great improvement and strength.

But it is not always true that the winner of a struggle is the best. It happens just when there is a transparent and fair evaluation of competitors. As a result, competition does not always imply success.

For example, as A. Toynbee states in The Industrial Revolution, during the Industrial Revolution, capitalism guaranteed free competition between private owners of wealth and industrial freedom but it did not imply the production of man welfare. So the competitive system did not mean the best solution in people’s lives.

Furthermore, in contemporary economy, the role of competition is even more dramatic. Companies believe that if you beat competition, you get more customers. But beating  competition does not always mean producing a premium product. It often means capturing the market, reaching the most of consumers. It is evident in almost every shop: popular items usually fade in a couple of months to be substituted by something newer.  As a result consumers themselves assess the parts and decide the winner. Of course it is not a qualitative win because it is known that consumers’ choices are influenced by their mood and climate. So it is not necessarily transparent and fair competition.

What can you do if competition cannot secure excellence?

If the consumer culture is not able to single out the best product, competition is non-sense. All in all, I would suggest it to be more cooperative.