Education and social critic Alfie Kohn is an exhaustive researcher and engaging writer. I have not read all of his eleven original books, but I do highly recommend these two: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. The titles and subtitles make clear his premises about human motivation and behavior. In his first book, however, No Contest: The Case against Competition, Kohn writes (p. 9), “The more closely I have examined the topic, the more firmly I have become convinced that competition is an inherently undesirable arrangement, that the phrase healthy competition is actually a contradiction in terms.†To this, I must take exception.Kohn, a strong defender of intrinsic motivation, frames his critique of competition—an extrinsic motivator—as setting up an irreconcilable conflict between doing well and beating others, as focusing on competence and accomplishment vs. trying to do something better than someone else. But healthy competition, especially the economic type, requires strong focus on doing well; beating someone else in the process, if it is focused on at all, is consequence. Kohn’s understanding of economic competition, unfortunately, is laced with Marxist mythology, Galbraith’s dependence effect, and the doctrine of pure and perfect competition, so he sees competition as an unfair and arbitrary creator of desires. Even at the highest levels of athletic competition, winning is consequence of doing well. Winning for its own sake is indeed not an attractive character trait.
Other forms of competition, however, do tend to focus exclusively, or nearly so, on beating others. Competition in the animal kingdom is the extreme example where, because of the limited supply of food and territory, competition often becomes a fight-to-the-death encounter. Among humans living in a society of abundance, a different kind of fight-to-the-death desperation is sometimes seen—not physical desperation as animals might face, but psychological. Because of the anxiety that many people feel, “competitiveness,†or a desperate need to defeat others, becomes a defensive motivator. Doing well takes a back seat. Occasionally, a highly talented and accomplished person exhibits defense-driven competitiveness, but this does not detract from the point that the source of the competitiveness is psychology and the source of the accomplishment is ability.
The one form of competition that devalues doing well and encourages beating others is that caused by government intervention into the economy. Mises points out that totalitarian states encourage people to “court the favor of those in power,†but this is true of any bureaucratic intrusion into the economy. Licensed professionals, because of the privileges extended to them by the government, will focus less on doing their jobs well and more on making sure the bureaucrats keep the unlicensed out of their market. Because of the restriction in supply brought about by the licensing monopoly, the consumers of that profession must now scramble—not too differently from what animals must do in their kingdom—to compete with each other, that is, to try to beat others, to obtain that limited supply. The beaten ones, as in the medical market, go without.
Kohn’s book is filled with examples of bureaucratic and defensive competition, two types that I would agree are unhealthy, but he does not always identify them as such. He, of course, confuses the two with healthy, economic competition. If read with an understanding of this confusion in mind, Kohn’s book can provide a detailed analysis of the less savory forms of competition that exist in our society.
Jerry Kirkpatrick is author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Visit his blog.
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Years ago, I had an email exchange with Kohn, and while we agreed on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation where grades are concerned, the notion that education was best pursued in a market context rather than a government monopoly rendered him apoplectic. What he failed to understand then, and apparently still does, is that competition, properly speaking, is derivative of the cooperation that is the essence of the social enterprise and thus of the free market that is a subset of it.
That is, he fails to understand that unless and until two parties agree to exchange something — i.e., engage in the cooperative process called trade — competition has no roll to play. For unless there is a buyer and a seller, there is no reason for another would-be buyer or seller to interject himself into the situation.
Never mind that this is as lost on those who espouse socialism in education as it is on those who espouse it elsewhere. The plain fact is that however intense competition can become in a given market, that market depends on cooperation for its existence. Just as society as a whole does.
“Competition is merely the absence of oppression.”
When I think about positive competition– the competition of the free market– I simply look out the window while I drive and look at the businesses.
For example, I might notice the remarkable diversity of pizza restaurants. Some well-known nationally, some locally, some mom-and-pop shops. The remarkable thing about this competition is that they all stay in business and all of them make a profit for many years (some have been open for over 30). The owners are usually well rewarded. They employ hundreds of workers. The prices for large pizzas go from $5 to $25 at all different levels of quality (from 10 minutes or less to artisan made over a wood-fired brick oven). True, from time to time one pizza place closes its doors. Another will open in a few months down the street.
No one is out sabotaging the other business, no one is bad-mouthing the competitors in order to get the other’s customers. No one tries to become the sole pizza provider (or at least, no one is so successful that they can please every palate). The business owners and managers are not cigar-chomping, ruthless sharks. Who’d buy a pizza from that guy? It’s not dog-eat-dog, not survival of the fittest, and it’s not all sorts of other negative cliches.
when I think of the negative sort of competition, the kind of under-handed, dirty, winner-take-all… the only kind of competition that breeds that is the competition for political power.
truly, a new term is needed for the negative type of competition.
I have only read excerpts of Kohn’s work. As the first commenter, I find the point about grades and development of internal motivation critical. I see this as a global maximization problem.
If there is an exploitable situation in the economy there will generally be more than one person thinking about how best to exploit it. Hence there will always be competition.
The question is what to compete in. Deciding early what you will compete in without adequate exploration is suboptimal, both for optimal performance, and satisfaction. Grades, success in sports, and many other goals we hold dear are simply local minima and can distract from exploration.
If Kohn desires to extend this steering away from competition for the entire society, in all situations, that seems entirely ill advised, and ignorant of how the human organism and the free market are designed.
Competition gets a bad name because it has two simultaneous meanings in the English language. The French language makes a distinction between compétition and concurrence.
Economic competition for markets is concurrence, while a golf tournament would be compétition.
Only two options exist whereby members of society are fitted to the performance of contributions.
In one, each chooses for himself his role and is judged for fitness by the response of his fellows to his efforts. In the other, some authority must decide, not only in what role each will serve but, as well, how well he has succeeded. One of these is clearly a totally unfree arrangement.
On this topic (as on so many others), Mises said virtually everything worth saying (in Human Action).
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