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Is competition good? or bad?Xaferrow
Do you think that competition good ?
or bad? Solon_Poledourus
I think friendly competition is good. Competition as an institution however, I think is bad. Marketplace competition for instance, forces small companies making good products out of business while large companies building cheap products rule the market.
deanhills
We live in a competitive society and I doubt we can get away with not being competitive. For example when we go to school we already compete in sports, in class, for friends maybe. Some people seem to need to do it ruthlessly, i.e. go a little overboard, such as cheating in sports (taking drugs or trying to eliminate someone from the race), and that is probably negative, but inevitable given human nature. Hopefully there will always be people around however to sort out these excesses.
rockacola
Competition is reason of (most) improvements.
If you like our life to be better in certain way (faster computer, cheaper grocery) then you should appriciate competition. However if you are the type of person who like things to be the way it is, then you may consider competition to be evil. There's no right or wrong answer really. deanhills
Solon_Poledourus
Improvement can be made without competition. And cheaper is not always an improvement, in fact, it often means lower standards and less quality in production in order to compete in the marketplace. Faster and better computers can be produced by smaller companies who take more time to design them, but larger companies will always make cheaper, less quality products. Same with groceries; better food items come from farmers markets and natural foods grocers, but larger corporate stores can sell cheaper groceries, which have been mass produced and are not nearly as healthy, for a lower price. Keep in mind that cheaper does not mean better, and quantity does not mean quality.
By "get ahead" you mean make more money? If that's the case, then having a better design doesn't necessarily do the job. Having a "cheaper" design does. At which point competition has actually lowered the quality of a certain product. Take Wal-Mart for example, they are arguably the most competitive retail store in the world, with more economic power than many countries. Smaller stores can create better products, but they are forced out of the market through corporate competition.
Sports competition is one thing. That's friendly competition, for the most part. Josso
Competition is a part of human evolution. It also is important to remember that competition predates morals.
Competition = good Solon_Poledourus
So does cannibalism, murder, theft, rape... the list goes on.
Until it is used as a tool to force quality down in order to bring quantity up. Then competition = evil. Xaferrow
I quite agree with Josso. without competition, we wont be here right now.
human exist because competition. Josso
Good point, as with everything I suppose it depends on the context - this "politically correct" opinion of eliminating competition in order to set a more friendly atmosphere or something annoys me though. Solon_Poledourus
Totally agreed. I don't think competition should be eliminated. I do think that it gets taken too far for the sake of profit, though. That's where I draw the line. I think it's downright evil for a corporation to lower quality in order to ramp up production, for the sake of taking over the economic territory of smaller, higher quality producing businesses. They call this economic competition, but it's essentially just corporate bullying under the guise of capitalism. supernova1987a
I agree. I also think that there should be fair competition. Lets evolve.  Jamestf347
Can be good and bad. Good as in, makes you work harder. Bad as in it can bring out the worst in people, and make friends get into arguements.
deanhills
mattyj
Competition is a good thing
Its what natural selection and evelution are all about...think about it, we wouldnt be human beings if it wasnt for competition for resources that made some apes leave the trees and start walking... deanhills
 Nameless
Competition is a concept so broad that you can't call it either good or bad; examples of either side clearly exist. (War could be called competition as much as hairdresser chains trying to outperform their rivals.)
snowboardalliance
Very good point. This thread is too black and white. There's no such thing as "good" vs. "bad" or "evil" it's really all on a continuum. Certain competition (which I agree is broad) is beneficial to society ("good") and other times it is harmful ("bad"). Also, if it is "beneficial" that is an averaged result where there are obviously people worse off because of it. So really, saying that competition in general is "good" or "bad" is oversimplifying things. Jaan
Competition is always good. Even if its war, the positive aspects of any situation can be debated and usually win out in the end.
Magicman
Competition feeds innovation. I don't think that there is has been any innovation which didn't stem from some sort of competition. Without competition there would really be no need to improve or invent anything. By competition, I mean competition in any sense. We have innovations in the field of medicine, for example, because we as a species are competing against illnesses in a sense.
Solon_Poledourus
When it becomes "lethal", it's no longer a sport. I think you are missing the point about my distinction between friendly competition and unfriendly competition. Friendly competition is natural. The things people do to improve themselves by comparison to another. That's a perfectly harmless(mostly), natural thing. These can be sports, spelling bees, art shows, etc. Then there's unfriendly competition, where making the other person lose is more important than the improvement of oneself, to such an extant that people cheat. This type of behavior is found in professional sports(not the mention of sports above lacks the prefix of 'professional'), corporate structures, politics, etc.
There has been plenty. In fact, history shows that the biggest innovations have come from societies working together, rather than against one another. SpellcasterDX
I would definitely say it's good. Lots of new things are invented/old things are improved when companies compete for consumer's money. Some of course are luxuries, but others are necessities. (can't think of any specific examples right now, but you get the point)
Yes, there is a point where it becomes violent sometimes, such as in wars for political power, but then I don't really consider that competition anymore. That's just, idk, normal fighting. Solon_Poledourus
So nobody here has thought about the last time they bought something that had a good price tag on it, and thought "wow! what a good deal for this item.", and then found out later what a piece of junk it is?
That's due to marketplace competition as well. When companies fight for the consumer dollar, some things improve, but just as equally, quality tends to be sacrificed for quantity. I know competition can be a good thing, but it can be just as bad. I'm only playing devils' advocate here because it seems like people are so accepting of competition as a fact of life that they are not seeing the dark side of it in the most obvious place. deanhills
william
Well, competition is one of those things that is generally good, but can become bad. As long as rules aren't broken, competition is a good thing. (ie. don't destroy, literally, your competitor's factory). These days, I've noticed how a lot of the food I buy has been quite a bit cheaper than usual, and the reason is that new, smaller, stores have come up with similar products at a much lower price. In order to stay in the game, prices had to be cut. It's a win for the consumer. Also, much goes for automobile manufacturers. Many companies with fairly inferior products are forced into lowering prices if they want to survive. Once again, a win for the consumer.
Competition is also something that allowed the human race to advance to where it is today. I'll use one fairly recent example, the Space Race. Had the United States not try to compete with the Soviet Union, what were our chances of reaching the moon? Competition is also something that motivates us to move forward in new advancements. Of course, there are a number of exceptions. For example, when one or two companies come into almost total dominance of a market, that makes it difficult for smaller companies to jump in. They have to introduce a better product at a better price. Also, competition in business should never come to an end, nobody wants a monopoly. All in all, competition is certainly a good thing, but like almost everything, it has limits. Solon_Poledourus
We like to say that we demand quality goods. But then that doesn't explain why most giant corporate retailers sell junk, and are indeed the dominant companies, compared to smaller manufacturers who actually produce quality items. Sadly, people accept the cheaply made, mass produced items out of convenience. So the competitive market will always favor the corporate giants who produce lower quality products as long as this continues.
I see this example used often. The down side of it is that it caused alot of harm and animosity between the USSR and USA. I also never see anyone saying that cooperation has "allowed the human race to advance", when it obviously has. More is always accomplished through cooperation than through competition. Competition may have led to advancements in science and technology, but the schools of science and technology were born out of cooperation and a mutual curiosity. Fatality
Competition is good in my opinion. Not only does it not allow monopolies, but also pushes people to do better. Sometimes competition can get out of hand and cause problems, but for the most part I believe it to be a good thing.
deanhills
Jamatu
Competition is good as long as the people involved are using it for the right reasons. Competitions can be used to expose your own weaknesses in whatever it is your competing. You can then use this and learn from it.
Obviously most people will just see competitions as a means to prove that they are better than someone else or if they believe it better than everyone else. erlendhg
Competition is like water.
You can't live without it, still if you drink too much of it, you die. What a philosophical comparison  spring567
It is good ,I think.
Zombie
Competition is very good. Everyone seems to be competing against someone else. And that competition improves everyone's abilities, because they are constantly striving to outdo each other.
Nameless
I would very much like to hear you debate that the positive aspects of war "win out". shkumbin
You are absolutely right !!! bigt
Exactly. Competition feeds the fire of innovation. Combine competition with moral capitalists and you have the building blocks of what made the U.S. great. Notice I said moral capitalists. We've seen what happens when people get greedy. Follow the money. guissmo
No competition allows for mediocrity. And no one would be driven to do something or improve their products or whatever they're doing without competition. And that would be plain sad... or y'know... chaotic.
Bluedoll
Competition is like authority. You know you are going to run into it, only if it hurts you is it a problem.
shkumbin
Spot on !!! Kohi
Like erlendhg said. It truly is water. You do need it to have enjoyment (video game competition) and sales (shop competitions) but too much and then the world just goes nuts.
Subsonic Sound
Fair competition is good, but it can run out of control, which is why we have things like the Monopolies Commission.
Independent companies have to start out on a small, local scale, and this is fine if they are competing against other local companies. Unfortunately in many industries they compete against large national or multinational companies, who are able to undercut them effortlessly. A real world example, that's been plaguing me. There are two big towns near me, which I'll call Town A and Town B. In Town A, the local bus company has already been driven out of business, and a large national company runs all the bus services. In Town B, there is still an independent local company. But the national company has dropped its prices so low that it is actually running at a loss. It does this by raising prices in Town A, since there's no longer anyone there who can compete. Bus prices in Town A become obscenely high, and in Town B, there is literally no way that the local company can compete. Before long, the local company in Town B will also go out of business, and prices in Town B will rise to undercut the local company in Town C. The prices in Town A won't come down... why should they? There's still no competition there. And if anyone does open up a new company there, the large company's prices will immediately and temporarily plummet. mwsupra
Competition is definitely good, unless your competitor is about to put you out of business! Without competition there would be no balance and companies would do whatever they want (more than they do now
 )sindi
Competition itself is probably bad because it brings out the competitive side of people, and that means we try to succeed at the expense of other people. But I don't think the fact that we are competitive means that we ourselves are bad; it just means we are human. We all have competitiveness in us. The person who manages to rid themselves of all competitiveness will be god incarnate.
I don't think we need competition to produce the best products we know how. We can be motivated by passion for what we do. The book "Drive" is about what motivates people, and the research mentioned in that book suggests that people are generally not motivated in the long-term by competition, but rather by mastery and meaningfulness. If competition is what motivates you, then you need to work on yourself internally - accept the fact that you are competitive, and then you can begin to change it. Many people don't like hearing this because they think it means they have to stop playing sports, but a game of hockey doesn't have to be competition. It only becomes competition when people are keeping track of score, and are preoccupied by knowing who is better than who. When I play outdoor hockey, we play without keeping track of score and often switch teams up too, so you really have no idea by the end of it if you won or lost. Tennis is also more fun without keeping track of points. When you think about it, points in games like tennis and hockey are meaningless -- I can get the same score against people I play tennis with as Federer and Nadal get against each other; 6-year-old hockey players can get the same score against each other that you see in the stanley cup finals or in the olympic gold medal match. This means that the score tells you nothing at all about quality of play. In games like Scrabble though, points can reflect quality of play. So you can do one of two things if you want to play scrabble non-competitively: keep track of your individual scores and don't bother asking what your friend's score is (remember in grade school, when your parents told you not to worry about the marks that other people got; only worry about your own?); or, add your points together and play cooperatively -- this version is a lot of fun! If both teams' goals are to be challenged and have fun and play a good quality game of hockey, then their goals are aligned not opposed, so this is a cooperative structure, not a competitive one. Can competition ever really be fair? When I played chess against my older brother and lost (he was 5 years older), was it fair? What about when two children in the same grade compete in a spelling bee, and one of them comes from a good home and gets lots of reading practice and the other doesn't? What if two people play a tennis match, but one of them has had way more practice than the other, or even a little more practice? Or what if one of them has stronger legs? Or is taller or more physically fit? What if two people try to start an online networking company, but one of them has the ability to advertise more because they have more money to start with, and then they end up getting all the business not because they have a better product, but because they have more people using their product to start with and then more people want to use the same networking site as their friends, so they get more and more business? Asap170
I don't know where you reside in (live in), but I live in the United States. Because of competition and that we then won't have monopolies, which are when one company buys out all of the other companies that do the same thing. For example: Verizon, Alltel, AT&T, Sprint...Verizon bought out Alltel so then there are 3 companies. If Verizon would get AT&T and Sprint then they will have a monopoly. Thus allowing them to raise prices on their phones and plans. So yes, competition is a very good thing. It help keeps our every day prices lower.
deanhills
Competition is almost inevitable. Along the lines of survival of the fittest. In order to get ahead, we need to be better all the time. And competition plays a great role in that. Take for example sports such as sprinting short distances, and it is the competition that gets a person to run that much better than the time before. Sometimes people compete with themselves, in order to stay ahead. But at other times they have to accept that someone else has gone one step better.
sindi
I took competition to mean structuring the situation so that there are winners and losers, so that a monopoly is an extreme form of competition; one company wins and all others lose. So it doesn't really make sense to say that we need competition to avoid having an extreme form of competition. The opposite of competition means that we think of a solution so that everyone wins. That is generally a good thing in every day life, I think. But I agree with you that monopolies are generally a bad thing. I just think of them as an extreme example of competition rather than as a lack of competition. Asap170
Well true, but with what you said not everyone react to competition the same way. So if your at a basketball game and your team that you play for loses and then you go out and just get wasted. It depends on the person's state of mind and who they are I guess.
sindi
I don't know if it is possible or not to live in a world without competition; I don't know whether living in a perfectly good world is possible or not. The person asking the question didn't ask whether it was possible to live in a world without competition, the person asked whether competition is good or bad, and to the extent that competition requires winners and losers, it is bad, in my opinion. The example of competing with yourself does not involve winners and losers, so I wouldn't even consider that competition. But you're right - if you are referring to competing with yourself, then competition isn't bad. It's when your goal is to get ahead of others that there starts to be a problem, because that divides the world into winners and losers. It is conceivable that our economic system might require some forms of competition in order to avoid more extreme forms of it, due to the nature of human emotions. But I think in all situations the goal should be to minimize the amount of competition, by which I mean minimize the gap between the outcomes for winners and losers by maximizing the outcomes for everyone involved. That is my opinion. And why should my goal be to get ahead of you? I would like to get joy from your success too. deanhills
sindi
[/quote]Good point sindi. My opinion is then that competition is mostly good, but it can be bad as well when the people who participate in the competition are taking the competition to its extreme. If we take golf as an example, competition is good to improve the sport. Competition can become bad when there is so much emphasis on money. Competition, if used right, can be healthy for everyone as it can make them stronger. But like anything else, competition can be overdone, and when it is, it can be destructive for those involved.[/quote]
Hmmm, how does competition improve the sport? What does it mean to use competition right? How can competition be healthy for everyone? The only time I've ever seen a structurally competitive situation be healthy for everyone is when the people in the situation didn't look at it as competition - their goals were not to beat each other, but to improve and challenge each other. People would generally not even keep score in such situations, and so it becomes non-competitive. I take competition to mean there are winners and losers because people's goals are opposed, but if my goal is to be challenged and play a good game of hockey, say, then we don't need to know the score to know whether we all succeeded, and my team's succeeding makes the other team's chances of succeeding increase, not decrease, so this becomes a cooperative structure. I question whether it can ever be healthy to try to succeed at the expense of someone else's failure. deanhills
How it improves sport. By creating competition in who can jump the furthest, people are jumping further. By creating competition to score better in golf, people are doing better at golf, same in tennis or any other sport. sindi
The book Drive by Daniel H. Pink gives lots of evidence that competition is not what motivates people to excel. Also the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that people are more creative when they are not thinking about trying to beat other people. Maybe jumping further doesn't need creativity - in that case, competition might help, but would anyone really want to watch a contest to see who jumps the furthest for the sake of the activity itself - if it is not an art form, why would it be interesting to watch? I can see people wanting to watch basketball because plays can be elegant and creative, but then competition hinders performance. The greatest basketball coach of all time, John Wooden, of the NCAA basketball team, told his players to not look at the scoreboard - it is distracting and useless information. He defined success to be the peace of mind you get from knowing that you performed to the best of your ability. He gave an interesting ted talk that you might be interested in watching - check it out by googling ted talks john wooden. sudipbanerjee
I think competition is necessary. But it must be fair in all aspects. Without competition nobody can judge himself or an organization or a product. For betterement of himself/organization/product competition is necessary.
Helios
Competition in general turns bad when the losing side will lose chances to improve, and/or the winning side is convinced that it needs no improvement.
You can relate this to most things: sports (for example loser receives destructive criticism and decides not to compete again), economics (i.e. large companies bullying smaller companies, low quality products remain in the market... etc), academy (higher scores are more important than actual knowledge - a knowledgeable student loses motivation if receives lower grade for example). So competition in essence is not good or bad, it's a natural part of the society and it simply exists, but like with many things, people can make it bad or good. I'm definitely far from being ab expert on this subject, but this is just my opinion... deanhills
CheDragon
always good... makes you improve
Chrisjak
Yes according to my view competition is good.
IceCreamTruck
I move to dismiss on the grounds that the poll is too vague!
More information is required to establish a frame of reference. Let me show you.... Competition amongst plants for limited resources could mean your entire garden experiment fails and you have no food for next harvest. Competition = bad. Competition amongst those same plants might produce an individual specimen or species that is triumphant over the other individuals or species, but suited more to this particular location at this particular time, but will eventually die because the species that it replaced was actually better at surviving in the environment as a whole over long periods of time, so the "competition" here caused the extinction of both varieties. Competition = bad. Competition for world power, or peace of mind, has always been a large focus point of spending of the Gross National Products of the largest and "wisest" cultures of the world as we protect ourselves from ourselves instead of choosing to always invest in research, medicine, and the next generation/world of tomorrow. That competition, if simply not the right time and place given our current knowledge about the very fabric of our existence, has lead us to knowledge of nuclear power, fission, and possibility of controlled fusion, but has dearly cost the US, Russia, England, and now the Japanese in accidents that are hard to clean up and affect the health of those they help to sustain. Competition = good and bad Competition amongst brothers causes one to become a doctor and one to become and engineer when no one in their families has ever even graduated high school. Competition = good. Competition within a species cleans the gene pool of undesirable traits and favors desirable traits or as a survival mechanism given there is time to change with an environment or to new stimuli. Competition = good. Competition between companies drives down cost, but produces a real two sided coin situation. Are you the consumer or are you finding out your new ice-cream shop grand-opening is shared with another new ice-cream shop grand-opening on the same street, and they plan to open the same day. Competition = confusing. Will the efforts of you both produce a more ice-cream aware culture, They are actually selling frozen yogurt to the half of your customers who actually eat that crap but won't eat good and delicious ice-cream, or will your efforts stifle each others progress because you are both located in Fairbanks, AL where the market is tough already? I will say without a doubt: Competition produces change, and that change can be good or bad depending on your perspective. (IceCreamTruck just remembered he doesn't really exist, and promptly vanishes in a puff of neopolitan colored smoke) deanhills
Great post! In other words competition is good or bad relative to the situation? I agree with all the points you made. Particularly the one about icecream. I love a good icecream and I have lots of respect for a vendor who knows how to do icecream right, i.e. avoid those crystals from forming, and tend it carefully. Lots of the junk that is out there, especially frozen yogurt, has to be bad for us, so in a way that kind of competition can be bad.
 I see a rainbow coming up, reminding me of a thread in this forum a while ago by Bondings about a double rainbow ....
Now we have a neopolitan rainbow ....  achowles
While it has already been highlighted that there are many examples of how competition can be bad I'd say that on the whole it's a good thing. It is what has got us to where we are and it is what will take us further. The alternative is stagnation and corruption. Not good.
deanhills
Aren't competition in our genes though? Right from the moment we are born, don't we compete with our siblings? I.e. for affection from our parents or one another? For doing better in anything including sports?
DrewAdams
ya of course specially in current period competition is the second name of life.
Fleming58
Competition is very necessary to survive.
ankitdatashn
It depends, if there are scarce resources to live on then competitions becomes necessary, but if there is plentiful for everyone then competition is not necessary. I believe competition is created in todays world just because of huge human population, otherwise God has created enough for everyone! deanhills
pll
I think that competition is great in any industry, if you take technology by example : if there was no competition in the domain, there wouldn't be any advances. Competition makes the world turn by and go forward to the future, instead of doing nothing. It makes industries move and that's good.
But if you see it on the Human side competition can be bad. Competition between persons is good until it reaches a certain point. I mean, if someone becomes too greedy the competitor will really feel bad, and competition (between individuals) can lead to violence in extreme cases. It's good until' you reach a certain point. Too much is the same thing as not enough. deanhills
-Anonymous-
I know I'm only at the age of 11 but I see your point very vividly. Economical marketing and competition has a very variable manner compared to everyday competition, or in other words competition in my school. Sporting competitions or others are seen to have its positives and negatives, but clearly the industrial competition is something very different. Thank you for your opinion, I found this quite useful at my debating as I myself thought the same way. ~Anonymous~  SC__Programmer
eh...competition can be fun to a certain point
But when it goes out of hand,and off topic,then gets into a CO2 BeeBee war out in your underwear,thats when you should stop deanhills
I love your way with words, I think I get what you are saying (sort of a new language for me), but hilarious anyway.
I agree however. Everything that is overdone, including competition, can turn into a negative. I seem to recall an ice skating incident a few years ago - there was a movie about it as well - Tonya Harding (one of the competitors)'s husband arranged for her rival, Nancy Kerrigan to be attacked so that Tonya could win. I guess that is when competition gets completely out of hand. Source: Wikipedia Nintendo
I think competition is very natural among people (and any other species) really.
However, I feel that people can get too wrapped up in competition a lot of the time, which can make them become greedy and unreasonable. I think it can really bring out the worst in a person, in both situations where a competition is won or lost. Bad losers are pretty annoying, but bad winners are even worse. I despise arrogance of all kinds, and as a result I really dislike those who get so wrapped up in competition that they feel they should always be the ones on top. It's really important to remember that competition in most cases (I'm not talking life-critical here) is there to provide fun; and fun is the most important thing in my opinion, which I think a lot of people forget or don't realise. I find football (soccer) is a good example of competition which goes way too far. It is very common for players to purposely dive, break the rules, time-waste and lie to the referee; because they know that his decision is final. Footballers pretty much dump the concept of fairplay. I like to play football, and I really hate it when players knowingly have touched the ball out of play, but still appeal for the throw-in... Just cos they wanna win... over having fun and playing fair. If a player was to get a throw-in, but then say "no actually, this isn't mine it's the other team's" in a professional game of football, can you begin to imagine how his team / fans would react?
Anyway sorry for the rant, this is just a topic I've thought a lot about =x deanhills
Nice post Nintendo. And I agree. Competition can be overdone at times, particularly when there is plenty of money involved through sponsorships. Can be a killer, almost literally.
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