Competition v. Cooperation

Right now, politicians goaded by money from business elites are pushing the concept that competition is good in schools. And I am not talking about interscholastic sports (Friday Night Lights, etc.). They are saying that educational vouchers and charter schools provide competition that forces public schools to up their games.

Yeah, right. These business mavens are the same ones who are saying out loud that competition is for suckers and their goal is monopoly, giving them the ability to set prices all by themselves in their captured markets.

So, yes, they are lying, either deliberately or just passing on the lies of others because it suits their needs.

So, would competition between schools actually serve to increase the performances of the schools? It turns out that the mistakes are many and deep. At the deepest level, history shows us that competition produces cooperation, not the other way around. As one author, Glenn Borchardt, put it “First came the traffic accidents, then came the traffic signals.” Even conflicts, huge in scale, like wars end and produce cooperation in the form of new trade agreements, marriages, culinary diversity, best friends, and so on.

At this time the 2026 Winter Olympics is going on and at the top of the medal count charts is Norway, a tiny country. They must, like China, get kids involved in competing at very young ages and then weeding out the less proficient to end up with all those Olympic Champions and medalists, right?

Wrong.

Norway actively discourages competitions in their youths until they are well into high school. For example, a school will put on a run and time the kids running, but then no medals are awarding nor are the times posted, so the kids have no way to compare themselves against their classmates. Games, like soccer, are played but scores are not kept.

As usual, the education reformers, the edu-formers as I call them, have only half baked ideas, but because of their wealth and political leverage, they get their way more often than not. For example, there has never been a poll in which the public has stated it would like to have educational vouchers implemented. So, harkening to the people, the state legislatures, and how the federal government, has avoided them like the plague … wrong! Voucher systems have been implemented all over the country resulting in billions of public funds being transferred to private schools. A large majority of voucher users are already in private schools, so the parents of these children are just pocketing the money. Maybe the private schools benefit from people being more willing to send their kids there, because their tuition in part or whole is being refunded to them, but their kids were already enrolled! So, the educational funding, collected to support public schools is being funneling into the pockets of the elites who had already put their kids in those schools. (There is a long history of rich folks sending their kids to private schools and then resenting the fact that they pay taxes to education the great unwashed majority that doesn’t include their kids. That they benefit from having an educated populace escapes them somehow.)

Free Market Bullshitters

I ran across this quote in a blog recently: “. . . I recently engaged in a conversation with a ‘politically agnostic’ economist whose detached perspective from political tribalism allowed her to offer insights into how free markets could benefit society.”

How free markets could benefit society . . . hmm. I think that might be fine as long as on the other pan of the balance was stacked all of the “how free markets could harm society” aspects.

This seems to be yet another example of an economic presuppositionalist apologist. These are people who preach the merits of free markets, assuming them to be net good things but they have one rather large problem. They cannot point to any such thing ever having existed in anything like a modern society, let alone a successful one. In other words, they do not exist. If they did exist I am sure that they would offer something but what that is is debatable. The historical examples of trying to impose such systems, e.g. The Chicago Boys in Chile, have been disastrous.

The major flaw in capitalism is simple: there is no control over human greed.

The major flaw in capitalism is simple: there is no control over human greed. Currently, in the U.S., we have business leaders saying things like “competition is for suckers” and their main goal is “market domination,” or if they are being cute and precise, “domination of their market segment.” These things are what we call monopolies. Of course, competition is touted as the main cog in the machine of capitalism, but there is no mechanism to preserve or enhance it, so the greedy immediately set out to eliminate it. In its absence there is no one to offer better prices, better service, etc. so they can set their own prices, levels of service, and most importantly, their profit margins.

Free market capitalists also gloss over that there are two primary modes of such intercourse. The Basic Law of the Tribe is that we compete with others, but we cooperate with other members of our tribe. Competition creates winners and losers, consider, for example, sports competitions. Inside of our “in group” we do not want to have any losers, so we cooperate rather than compete. This is why competition in education is a lousy idea, but is still touted by these people as a good idea, because competition works so well in the world of commerce. Yo, business dudes, if it works so well why are you hell bent on eliminating it in your “market segment?” Do we really want our kids to be actively segregated into classes of “winners” and “losers,” by our educational system? We generally consider that to be a failure of our current system. Can you consider your family gathered around your dinner table, but only the kids who did well in school that day get to eat? The others need motivation to work harder, right? Competition is good . . . always, right?

The Basic Law of the Tribe is that we compete with others, but we cooperate with other members of our tribe.