What will bee will bee...
Follow the bouncing ball ;)
Where I get stuck is why such an emphasis on competition?
Some people really don’t have many “marketable skills”, especiacially some with severe learning disabilities etc... is it not valuable to be a good friend or make someone smile or just spend a life in quiet contemplation?
If resources are scarce and a population has no self regulation mechanism to limit it’s size then something needs to fill that gap, and nature will, though maybe not in a way we find appealing, but I don’t think that is even relevent here. Wealth and propogation seam to be inversely related if anything and we as a species have the ability, if we use these big brains, to provide the basic necessities for everyone alive pretty easily. If anything competition is causing the destruction of those resources.
How much harder has industry and competion made it to get truly clean water (not chemically treated or polluted) or food that has the nutritional value it did 100 years ago and without the added poison or clean air... we don’t really need much more than that and it seems that competition can be blamed in large part for their scarcity. That or our reptilian overlords (they hate our freedom as good old george bush might say). (What?)
Some dont have marketable skills, but some spend so much time doing simple tasks like taking orders or whatever to make ends meet that the opportunity cost is mastering something they always wanted.
I've seen it work more times than not when a person takes a chance on themselves doing what they love it tends to become marketable if they can find an avenue. You'll only ever excel at that which you find interesting.
Some people sit around playing Xbox too - some are raised to have low skill levels. People want wealth without putting in the hard yards to get it, including skill development. No one gets paid a a top singer - then buys singing lessons.
Well yeah I'm not arguing with you there at all. but there is 160m jobs according to the president. there are 300 million people here. that math sucks you know. All I'm saying
Perhaps you need a new president ;)
That isn't quite the way it goes though, as there are those in the working age, say 18-65 and those not. If you open up the paper or a recruitment site, there are job openings in most places, but people have standards as to what kind of job they are willing to take. At the moment with Corona, things change, but a few weeks ago (my wife is in recruiting for a large retailer) she was struggling to find people to work.
I find it interesting when for example, people talk about Steem/hive earning not being adequate, but there are jobs they can take stacking shelves at the supermarket where they can earn a helluva lot more. People gaming 10 hours a day saying "there are no jobs". There is generally work for the willing.
Do you play a sport?
I played soccer, baseball and basketball as a kid, mostly because my dad wanted me to. now i prefer lone sports like running althought my absolute favorite is ultimate frisebee.
I found that with competitive sports, whether competing alone or on a team, there is always a winner and a loser. And there is almost always anger, resentment, frustration etc... that may just be because of conditioning.
When I play ultimate frisbee, (or used to anyway) I would play harder than anyone, and I often felt like a super hero. But it wasn’t competition that fueled that intensity unless you count competition against myself. We never kept score and I always felt really gratified whenever anyone on either team made an awesome play or reached past their comfort zone and excelled. The only times I felt frustration were when either someone did something shitty to someone else just to get ahead or when I got caught up in the “competitive spirit” of those around me and then either was on the “losing team” (sometimes in college i played with that kind of crowd) or was on the “winning team” and Saw how many on the other team felt.
Even with table tennis (another passion) i can lose 100 games in a row and have a blast (usually its better that way because i learn/grow more and the other person doesnt get sore with me).
I know that is perhaps an uncommon ability/characteristic, as I don’t see it often in others, but I world based on that spirit is one I would be really excited to live in.
Most likely conditioning, fear of failure and giving weight to an imaginary ego.
Like many, I think you see competition as a win and lose. That is not actually what the term means though.
It means to strive together. Two people can train together for example to run the fastest. they can work together and help each other improve. If they really want to see who is the fastest, they will do all they can to not only be their best, but help the other be their best too. They will experiment together and use the best practices to improve and then innovate to see if the can improve again.
But then, most people like yourself seem to think that competition is to win at the expense of another. That is conditioning.
Perhaps so.
In my experience highly competetive environments breed emotions that i find counterproductive to self growth and inner peace except insofar as to experience them, see them for what they are and move past them.
Perhaps for others this is not the case, however that is not my only problem with competiton for resources being the method of resource allocation. If we base “who gets what” on who is better on getting it, we are essentially saying that those of us who don’t excell at business deserve a lower standard of living than those that do. Put another way, those that are willing to do anything, no matter the impact on those around them, are more deserving of the necessities of life.
If capitalism is our main method of assigning value then we are assigning the most value not to those who are doing the most good, but those who are extracting the most from those around them. This not only creates a pretty terrible worldview, it creates a pretty terrible world. What wealth hasn’t been created by the sweat of another’s brow or by exploiting resources that come from a planet that is the birthright of every earthling for one’s own profit? What giant corporation (the “winning team”) doesn’t seek to externalize as many costs as possible to be paid by the losers? (Every kind of pollution, lost biodiversity, destruction of every virgin forest, the almost complete sterilization of the oceans)
That is the extreme i suppose and that doesnt mean that everyone who has a comfortable income acts that way, though certainly the very wealthy do, who as you have said also benefit from the law of increasing returns which makes the problem much worse.
It is pretty frustrating how much life seems to be wasted today pretending to kill other people in a virtual world, I havent owned a television in almost 20 years let alone a video game console so i totally get where you’re coming from. But I sort of suspect that that habit may be, like drug and alchohol addiction or any other escape mechanism, A way of dealing with a world that doesnt seem to make sense. Then again I also find it difficult to put myself in the shoes of someone who spends all their time in that way. There is certainly plenty of competition taking place there though, I’ve found myself amongst people caught in that trap before and they are definitely competitive about their video games.
You have narrowed it to the domain of business, which is the point of the article. open up much wider than that.
There is competition in every domain, including who can be the most pious.