For those of us who defend the positives of capitalism, the first place we usually start is competition.

There are many more parts to capitalism than just competition, but the most popular conception of capitalism is as a system that uses competition as an organising principle.

People do things for friends out of friendship, for family out of love and for their close community based on shared narratives and a promise of reciprocity.

Beyond this, when we want to co-operate at scale, when we want to trade time and energy with strangers, one of the best methods or organising that are by creating competitive markets.

Competition as a very valuable organising principle and I believe it’s one worth defending, but to do so blindly is naive. We should interrogate and acknowledge the many downsides of market economies, so that we can improve their weaknesses and better defend their virtues.

When Workers Compete

The benefits of a competitive labour market are easy to articulate. If everyone wants to invest time and effort in their education and training to get the best paying jobs, then the education levels, skills and productive capacity of the whole country rise.

We all work hard, make good contributions and create value in part because it will put us in line for better jobs, higher salaries or career progression.

An absence of any competitive tension could make us lazy, unproductive and unfulfilled.

The theory makes sense, but there’s something very obviously missing from the last few sentences. We can feel it intuitively. Surely all our life can’t be about competing, comparing ourselves to our neighbours and investing in ways to eek out an edge?

That sounds exhausting, both physically and emotionally.

It sounds quite unfulfilling too. Surely we do better work when we co-operate instead of compete? Or at least a mixture of both?

As for the theory that a complete absence of competition will cause laziness, a leaf through the history books will show us that a huge number of advances in our quality of life have come from artificially lowering competition, not increasing it.

Creating and increasing the minimum wage, creating the five day and forty hour workweeks and introducing mandatory annual leave and bank holidays are all victories of the Union movement which could be described as reducing competition between workers, but all of which enhanced our quality of life.

Competition is Good For Companies?

If we benefit from artificially reducing competition between people when they work, surely competition between companies is unambiguously good?

It’s true that we all benefit when companies are competing to provide products and services for us, but have you worked in highly competitive, low-margin businesses? It can be miserable.

One of a dozen local coffee shops on the brink of bankruptcy. A discount airline with a 3% profit margin. A ruthlessly competitive supermarket. Not the kind of work environments we dream of when we think of dream jobs, full of stability and promise.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the best times of my working career is when I’ve been working in high-margin, less competitive companies. Not un-competitive. I’m not making the case for monopolies, and I’m not suggesting that intense bursts of competition can’t help drive us to do some of our best work, but it’s undeniable that ferocious competitive environments can be gruelling and grinding.

Competition is a Tool, Not A Lifestyle

The inherent conflict here seems to be that we’re all the benefactors when strangers are competing for our money, but we’re the losers if we spend our lives constantly competing.

Any economic philosophy with that claims blindly that “competition is good,” without nuance, talks to us only as recipients of the system, not as participants.

It is unsurprising that among young people, anti-competitive ideas are gaining strong traction. If I lived in a constantly competitive system, from school to college to work, I’d push back against it too.

Any progressive economic philosophy what wants to include the value of competitive markets (which it should), must recognise them as useful tools, but not an ideology.

If competition can create great benefits, we need to balance it with time and space to enjoy the rewards. We can spend much of our time doing good work, but also make time to enjoy fruits of our labour.