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Level -> Competition (5/1/2008 6:11:03 PM)
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quote:
When the philosopher Satchel Paige warned us not to look back (because something might be gaining on us), he couldn’t have imagined how prescient he was, even though his own career in baseball pointed the way to the world we would all someday inhabit. Restricted to the Negro Leagues for more than two decades, Paige finally broke into Major League Baseball in 1948. Within a couple of decades black ballplayers had become dominant figures in the majors, the Negro Leagues had collapsed—and baseball had become a much more competitive place.
That will happen when barriers fall. Technology has some of the same effects: Newspapers find themselves competing with bloggers, traditional stores with Amazon, and singles bars with Cupid.com. Americans find that, thanks in part to technologies they invented or pioneered, they’re competing with workers in India, China, and other far-off lands who are willing do the same work for a lot less money. Even individuals in need of a Little League logo or a personal webpage are finding people who can do the job for less in Bucharest or Bangladesh.
Competition—the reality but also the metaphor—has somehow come to pervade modern life, much as we try to wish it away or pretend, as in five-year-olds’ soccer games, that it isn’t really going on. In some cities, the preschool admissions process is as fraught as the mass version of musical chairs with which top universities fill their classes. Stepped-up competition is apparent in the workplace as well. Companies are less willing or able to carry unproductive employees, but in today’s competitive business environment even productive workers can receive a pink slip when circumstances persuade executives that cutbacks make sense. Companies these days are less constrained by sentiment or tradition when considering whether to outsource, move, or shut a plant. A study earlier this year by economists Thomas Lemieux, W. Bentley MacLeod, and Daniel Parent found that “the overall incidence of performance-pay jobs has increased from a little more than 30 percent in the late 1970s to more than 40 percent in the 1990s.” Bonus, commission, piecework—whatever you want to call it, pay for production makes work seem a lot more competitive. When Fortune magazine reported on white-collar workers “fired at fifty” who couldn’t find comparable positions, the best advice from the experts was to embrace “involuntary entrepreneurship,” which of course means competing on your own without a company-provided pension, health insurance, sick days, or vacation.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=358755
How important is competition to society?
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