negative brief

2009-2010 NCFCA Lincoln-Douglas Debate

Negative Brief

Resolved: That competition is superior to cooperation as a means

of achieving excellence.

Joshua R. Mirth

Table of ContentsDefinitions:.................................................................................................................................................4

Competition:.....................................................................................................................................................4Superior: .........................................................................................................................................................5Cooperation: ...................................................................................................................................................5Cooperate: ......................................................................................................................................................6Means: ............................................................................................................................................................6Mean: ..............................................................................................................................................................6Achieve: .........................................................................................................................................................6Excellence: ......................................................................................................................................................6Contest:............................................................................................................................................................6

Values/Criteria:...........................................................................................................................................7Ability..............................................................................................................................................................7Aggression (Anti-value)...................................................................................................................................7Cheating (Anti-value).......................................................................................................................................8Competition......................................................................................................................................................9Confidence.......................................................................................................................................................9Efficiency.......................................................................................................................................................11Excellence......................................................................................................................................................12Friendship.......................................................................................................................................................13General Welfare..............................................................................................................................................16Individualism..................................................................................................................................................18Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic motivation....................................................................................................................21Motivation......................................................................................................................................................23Prosperity:......................................................................................................................................................24Quality............................................................................................................................................................25Rational Self-interest......................................................................................................................................25Success...........................................................................................................................................................26Victory:...........................................................................................................................................................27

Applications:............................................................................................................................................28Business..........................................................................................................................................................28Cold War.........................................................................................................................................................30Constitutional Convention..............................................................................................................................31Credit Cards:..................................................................................................................................................32Credit Unions:................................................................................................................................................34Debate............................................................................................................................................................36Education........................................................................................................................................................37Healthcare.......................................................................................................................................................39Human Nature................................................................................................................................................43Natural Selection / Basis for life.....................................................................................................................45Science...........................................................................................................................................................47Society............................................................................................................................................................48Sports..............................................................................................................................................................51

Subsumption / Balanced Neg.........................................................................................................................52War.................................................................................................................................................................54

Joshua Mirth PARADE, Wisconsin

Definitions:

Competition:

The act or action of seeking to gain what another is seeking to gain at the same time and usually under or as if under fair or equitable rules and circumstances: a common struggle especially among individuals of relatively equal standing. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

The act of seeking, or endeavoring to gain, what another is endeavoring to gain, at the same time; rivalry; mutual strife for the same object; also, strife for superiority; as the competition of two candidates for an office, or of two poets for superior reputation. - Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary

The act or process of competing : rivalry: as a : the effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favorable terms b : active demand by two or more organisms or kinds of organisms for some environmental resource in short supply - Merriam Webster Online Dictionary

Compete (root of competition): [to]engage in a contest; measure oneself against others - Princeton Wordnet

"Competition is an open market process of discovery and adjustment, under conditions of uncertainty, that can include interfirm rivalry as well as interfirm cooperation." - Dominick Armentano ( professor of economics emeritus at the University of Hartford, expert on antitrust policy and insurance regulation, and author) Antitrust: The Case for Repeal, 1986

“Competing with oneself” is not competition

The definition of competition requires an opponent, it is an interactive activity, therefore, you can’t compete with yourself.

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4, p. 6

“There is a difference between allowing one person to succeed only if someone else does not, on the one hand, and allowing that person to succeed irrespective of the other’s success or failure, on the other. Your success and mine are related in both competition and cooperation (though in opposite ways); they are unrelated if we work independently

“We sometimes assume that working toward a goal and setting standards for oneself can take place only if we compete against others. This is simply false. One can both accomplish a task and measure one’s progress in the absence of competition. A weightlifter may try to press ten

Negative Brief Definitions: Definitions:


pounds more than he did yesterday, for example. This is sometimes referred to as “competing with oneself,” which seems to me a rather unhelpful and even misleading phrase. A comparison of performance with one’s own previous record or with objective standards is in no way an instance of competition and it should not be confused with it. Competition is fundamentally an interactive word, like kissing, and it stretches the term beyond usefulness to speak of competition with oneself. Moreover, such sloppy usage is sometimes employed in order to argue that competition is either inevitable or benign: since nobody loses when you try to beat your best time, and since this is a kind of competition, then competition is really not so bad. This, of course, is just a semantic trick rather than a substantive defense of competition.”

Superior:

Situated higher up or farther from a bottom or base. Of higher degree or rank: taking precedence: of a higher order, nature, or kind. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

Higher or greater in excellence; surpassing others in the greatness, goodness or value of any quality; as a man of superior merit, of superior bravery, of superior talents or understanding, of superior accomplishments. - Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary

Cooperation:

The act of cooperating: a condition marked by cooperating: a joint operation: common effort or labor. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

To work or act together toward a common end or purpose. - The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Cooperation means more than putting people into groups. It suggests, rather, group participation in a project where the result is the product of common effort, the goal is shared, and each member's success is linked with every other's. Practically, this means that ideas and materials, too, will be shared, labor sometimes will be divided, and everyone in the group will be rewarded for successful completion of the task. -Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p.50-51

Difference between cooperation and coercion

VINCENT D. NICHOLSON “Cooperation And Coercion As Methods Of Social Change” PENDLE HILL, 1934, http://www.pendlehill.org/php/260-php001

By “cooperation” is meant those processes of education and persuasion in which the solution to a conflict is sought by the free-willing assent of both parties. By “coercion” is meant those processes by which one party to a conflict seeks to subject the other party to an outward compliance without an inner or free-willing assent.

Cooperation and coercion are based on widely different ideas


http://www.pendlehill.org/php/260-php001



Throughout all history civilized man has had recourse to two methods of adjusting conflicting interests and effecting social change. These contrasting methods may be defined by the terms “cooperation” and “coercion.” They do not stand in complete contrast either philosophically or politically. There is an intermediate ground in which they tend to merge into one another and the lines of distinction are not clear. Generally speaking, however, they involve widely different theories in regard to the nature of man, the morality of social conduct and the technique of effective group action. In practice they have had widely different results both in the inner life of man and in the character of social institutions and instruments.

Cooperate:

To act or work with another or others to a common end: operate jointly. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

Means:

Third person singular form of mean (verb). - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

Mean:

Something intervening, intermediate, or intermediary. Something by the use or help of which a desired end is attained or made more likely: an agent, tool, device, measure, plan, or policy for accomplishing or furthering a purpose. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

Achieve:

To bring to a successful conclusion: carry out successfully: accomplish. To cause to end: make to cease: bring about the end of. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

To gain or obtain, as the result of exertion. - Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary

Excellence:

The quality of being excellent: the state of possessing good qualities in an eminent degree: an excellent or valuable quality. - Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, Unabriged

An [sic] valuabale [sic] quality; any thing highly laudable, meritorious or virtuous, in persons, or valuable and esteemed, in things. (Brackets added) - Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary

Contest:

A competition based on skill, in which prizes are offered. - The Incentive Performance CenterA struggle between rivals -Princeton WordNet




Values/Criteria:

Ability

Cooperation promotes positive interdependence, not the sacrificing of ability

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 201

If CL [cooperative learning] is something more than casual groupwork, it is something less than altruism, or at least than the narrow version of altruism that requires an individual to sacrifice his or her own interests. In asking children to work together, we are not demanding that they ignore their own academic well-being in order to make sure that someone else understands the material.. Positive interdependence means that when you succeed, I succeed, too; my interest in your learning is matched by your interest in mine.

Having to help other’s doesn’t lower the achievement of better pupils Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 51

Having students help each other raises the question of whether students with lower ability are being helped at the expense of those with higher ability. Knowledge, happily, is not a zero-sum product. Anyone who has taught to tutored often pulls one to a more sophisticated understanding of the material. The cliché about teachers' learning as much as their pupils is quite true, and the tutoring that takes place in a cooperative classroom actually benefits both the helper and the helped more than a competitive, or independent study arrangement.

Aggression (Anti-value)

Competition demands aggression.


What is the relationship between competition and aggression? On one level, the question makes little sense since the two are not really distinct phenomena that can be related: competition is a kind of aggression... The arrangement is by its very nature a struggle or (depending on how one uses the word) an aggressive enterprise. Thus Horney was able to write: “Hostility is inherent in every intense competition, since the victory of one of the competitors implies the defeat of the other.”

If there is a connection to be drawn, then, it is only between trying to defeat someone and trying to do him harm beyond what is necessary for victory. The mediator between these two actions presumably would be feelings of hostility – which invariably attend competition at some level.

Watching aggressive behavior doesn't eliminate aggressiveness, it compounds it.




Watching others be aggressive does not discharge our won aggressiveness. What seems to happen instead is straightforward modeling: We learn to be aggressive. Our restraints against aggression are lowered. Whatever explanation we devise for this effect, however, one study after another has failed to show any catharsis [draining off of aggression due to watching others be aggressive, or to using aggression productively] effect.

Competition produces arousal, making us predisposed to act aggressively.


Many theorists propose that competition generates a high level of arousal, meaning that we may not immediately become aggressive as a result, but that we are predisposed to respond in this way if we are then frustrated by something. Of course most of us encounter frustrations all the time, so the competition-aggression link remains fairly solid.

Cheating (Anti-value)

Competition promotes cheating in all fields

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4

It would be a mistake, however, to restrict a discussion of cheating to athletics. A news dispatch from the 1985 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science began as follows: “Medical leaders and journal editors agreed today that highly competitive pressures in modern science were provoking cases of outright fraud and en even wider range of white lies and deception that they said were eroding the integrity of science...Dr. Robert G. Petersdord, vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California San Diego, said...The competition to win academic promotions and federal research grants was causing an undetermined number of scientists to exaggerate of cheat in reporting research they had done.”

Consider also the wide range of unethical and sometimes illegal behaviors in political campaigns: smearing opponents, accepting and laundering illicit contributions, tapping phones, stealing documents, forging letters, and burying all of this under and avalanche of lies. (The point of Watergate, remember, was to win a contest.) Then there are the bribes and sabotage that have come to be seen as a routine part of doing business, the selective use of evidence and the hundred other dirty tricks that are common practice among lawyers, the way the truth is stretched for effect when journalists compete for space and recognition the fat that premedical students sometimes ruin each other's experiments. Pick your field,; if people are competing, many of them are going outside of the boundaries that have been established to delimit acceptable ways to win.



Competition

The very nature of competition produces “abuses” of it.


If we get rid of troublemakers, if we don't go too far in our quest for victory, the there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the win/lose structure.

If you were an advocate of competition, this is precisely the tack you would take. No matter how frequently they seem to appear , you would argue that abusive, self-destructive, violent, or immoral behaviors are corruption of real competition, which is in its essence as virtuous and healthy as these”exception” are nasty and neurotic. To argue in this way is also to enjoy an appreciable rhetorical advantage, since such a position appears pleasingly moderate: you are not saying all competition is bad, but merely that it should not be done to excess. What could be more reasonable?

…

In the case of competition, the root cause of abuses is the competitive structure itself. “Abuses” then, is really something of a misnomer since these actions do not represent the contamination of competition but rather its logical conclusion....Hostility is virtually built into an arrangement where someone else's fate is inversely related to your own. So it is that a structural imperative to beat others invites the use of any means available. “The aim of competition is to win and the temptation is to win at any cos,” wrote Arthur combs. “Although it begins with the laudable aim of encouraging production, competition quickly breaks down to a struggle to win at any price.” This process is part of the natural trajectory of competition itself. The only distinction that a competitor qua competitor knows is that between winning and losing; other distinctions, such as between moral and immoral, are foreign to the enterprise and must be, as it were, imported. They do not belong. The only goal that a competitor (again, qua competitor) has is victory; the only good is what contributes to this goal. If a new goal is introduced – particularly one that interferes with winning, such as staying within the guidelines of appropriate conduct – it is likely to be pushed aside. This does not meant that people who do so don't understand how to compete; on the contrary, they understand perfectly. Their behavior follows from the structure.

Confidence

Competition increases self-doubt

Most people in any contest lose, and losing causes feelings of inadequacy, so competition tends to hurt more than it helps

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 108-109



There are several very good reasons why trying to outperform other people fails to allay the very self-doubts that gave rise to this behavior. The simplest explanation is that most competitors lose most of the time. By definition, not everyone can win, and, in practice, few do. In a one-on-one contest, the odds are 50-50; more commonly, competition is structured to produce a single champion and many more losers. If we feel impelled to prove ourselves by triumphing over others, we well feel humiliated when they triumph over us. To lose – particularly in a public event – can be psychologically detrimental even for the healthiest among us. At best, some exceptional individuals might emerge without damage to their self-esteem, but it is difficult to see how losing can enhance it. No one in a culture as competitive as ours is unfamiliar with the experience of being flooded with shame and self-doubt upon losing some sort of contest. And when we add the phenomenon of anticipating loss to the occasions of actually losing, it becomes clear that the potential for humiliation, for being exposed as inadequate, is present in every competitive encounter.

The more importance that is placed on winning- in the society in the particular situation, or by the individual – the more destructive losing will be.

The possibility of losing makes one anxious and unproductive


We can identify three reasons that competition leaves us insecure and anxious. The first and most obvious is apprehension about losing. Regardless of talent or psychological healthiness, the experience of having to prove oneself by outperforming someone else is invariably unsettling, to say the least. The constant possibility of being defeated simply is not conducive to feeling secure. When we do actually lose, this effect is compounded in subsequent competitive encounters. The process soon takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the fear of losing makes it more likely that this is just what will happen. Apart from its effect on performance, of course, anxiety is undesirable in its own right. It is one more unhappy legacy of the race to win.

Fear of winning also reduces performance.


The second reason for our anxiety concerns feelings of apprehension about winning. Now this seems most paradoxical given that the whole point of competition is to win. But if we think about it, we realize that it is not uncommon for capable competitors to trip themselves up just as it seems they are about to triumph. Consider the case of athletes who “choke” in the final round, a phenomenon that only recently has become the subject of scholarly interest.” The psychoanalytic tradition helps us to see that this pattern is neither random nor inexplicable. Rather, such people are recoiling from winning in a deliberate (if unconscious) way.

Competition causes anxiety, lowers performance



Anticipation of failure is an anxiety cause, most people fail in a competitive context, so they anticipate failure, become anxious.


Not only is competition not enjoyable enough to elicit high achievement — it is a distinct cause of anxiety. Even it the tangible stakes (money, job, trophy, grades) are not always high when people compete, the psychological stakes invariably are. In any given competition, most people will lose. Anticipation of failure combined with — and fueled by — memory of previous failure is a recipe for agitation, nervousness, and similar emotional states that interfere with performance when why occur to any significant degree.

…

Those who defend competition typically do not deny that it produces anxiety; instead, they insist that anxiety motivates us to perform better. It is true that slight anxiety can be productively arousing. The “Yerkes-Dodson law”, as it has come to be known, states that there is an optimum level of arousal for every task, and that this level is lower for tasks that are ore complex and difficult. But it would seem that competition often produces inhibiting levels of anxiety. At best, the stressfulness of a competitive situation causes us to try to avoid failure. And truing to avoid failure is not at all the same thing as trying to succeed. On the contrary, as the well-known motivation theorist John Arkinson wrote, “The tendency to avoid failure...functions to oppose and dampen the tendency to undertake achievement oriented activities.” The need to cut one's losses often results in reluctance to enter the competitive arena in the first place: deciding not to apply for the job or promotion, staying away from competitive recreation, remaining silent in the classroom, and son on. The person trying to avoid failure who is forced to compete may, paradoxically, become so agitated as to bring on failure --- and this can happen irrespective of the task's nature or difficulty. In any case, he or she certainly will not be in an ideal state for creative problem solving.

Efficiency

Competition precludes the more efficient use of resources that cooperation allows. Cooperation takes advantage of the skills of each member, non-cooperative approaches requires the same task to be performed by more than one person

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4, P. 61

Competition also precludes the more efficient use of resources that cooperation allows. One of the clear implications of the research conducted by David and Roger Johnson is that people working cooperatively succeed because a group is greater than the sum o its parts. This is not necessarily true for all activities of course; sometimes independent work is the best approach. But very often — more often that many of us assume — cooperation takes advantage of the



skills of each member as well as the mysterious but undeniable process by which interaction seems to enhance individuals’ abilities. Coordination of effort and division of labor are possible when people work with each other, as Deutch saw. Non-cooperative approaches, by contrast, almost always involve duplication of effort, since someone working independently must spend time and skills on problems that already have been encountered and overcome by someone else. A technical hitch, for example, is more likely to be solved quickly and imaginatively if scientists (including scientists from different countries) pool their talents rather than compete against one another.

Here it is not competition that is peculiarly unproductive; any kind of individual work suffers from this drawback. But structural competition has the practical effect of making people suspicious of and hostile toward one another and thus of actively discouraging cooperation.

Excellence

not the same thing as superiority

Simply beating someone doesn’t tell us if a performance is excellent.

Robert N. Singer & Richard F. Gerson, Athletic Competition for Children, p.253:

“If the athlete is being evaluated only on the basis of whether or not a rival as been beaten, little information is really provided relating to the level of excellence achieved in the performance.”

Success in competition doesn’t require absolute excellence, only superiority to opponents [76]

Coakley, Jay J., Ph.D., Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, “Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies,” fourth edition, 1990, Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing, St. Louis, MO. ISBN 0-8016-0304-8 GV706.5.C63, pp 75

It is ironic that popular beliefs tend to connect the achievement of excellence with competition. Victories within competitive reward structure are not inevitably tied to the achievement of excellence; victories only require comparatively better performances than the opposition. Victors may achieve excellence, but in many cases they simply come up with mediocre performances surpassing the performances of opponents. In fact, nothing more than this is necessary to be a winner within a competitive reward structure.

You only have to be good enough to beat your opponent in a competition [31]


When discussing the relationship between competition and excellence, remember the success in a competitive reward structure does not require an excellent performance, only a good enough performance to beat opponents.



Cooperation inspires people to excellence


What does lead to excellence, then? This depends on what field and task we are talking about, but generally we find that people do terrific work when (1) they are inspired, challenged, and excited by what they are doing, and (2) they receive social support and are able to exchange ideas and collaborate effectively with others. The data show that cooperation makes both more likely.

One can strive to reach a standard without competition, the confusion of the two is a cultural defect


The dependence on sports to provide a sense of accomplishment or to test one's wits is similarly misplaced. One can aim instead at an objective standard or attempt to exceed one's own previous record – the latter being what some people mean by the unfortunate phrase “competing with oneself.” Such noncompetitive striving can be very satisfying indeed, and cooperative games requiring skill and stamina similarly seem no less invigorating for the absence of a winner and a loser at the end. These games, as I will show shortly, often involve considerable strategy, proving that the obstacle to be overcome need not be another person. If large numbers of people defend competition because they want to be challenged, this cannot be surprising: it is the same confusion between achievement and competition that we have encountered before, and it is understandable given the hegemony of competitive games in our culture. Within such a game striving is striving for victory, so someone who knows only competitive games will come to equate the two.

Competition only produces excellence among those who are good to begin with. [55]


This belief [that competition leads to excellence] is accurate only if excellence is defined in terms of the accomplishments of a small segment of the population. Competition generally encourages those who already excel to develop their skills even further. For those who are unsuccessful, competition often creates frustration and disappointment and eventual withdrawal from participation.

Friendship

The hostility bred by competition seeps through into other relationships.




The assertion one sometimes hears to the effect that competition need not interfere with friendship assumes that our orientation toward someone can switch from supportive to rivalrous and back again as if we were changing television channels. It is simply unrealistic to think that the hostility engendered by and experienced during a contest will evaporate into thin air, leaving the friendship unaffected. I do not mean to say that no one has ever had a satisfying relationship with a competitor, but that competition inhibits such relationships, just as it corrodes the relationships we have already developed.

Competition makes us desire the failure of others, spreading even to non-competitive activities.


Competition by its very nature damages relationship. Its nature, remember, is mutually exclusive goal attainment, which means that competitors' interests are inherently opposed. I succeed if you fail, and vice versa, so my objective is to do everything possible to trip you up. This attitude does not reflect a neurotic or sadistic orientation on my part. It is the heart of competition itself because competition decrees that both of us cannot succeed. This effect is easiest to see where we compete face to face, but even where the contest is indirect, such as the diffuse pursuit of a consumer's dollar in which market share is gained at the expense of anonymous competitors, I will regard others – and correctly so - as stumbling blocks on my path.

Under conditions of competition, “the failure of others has the same relative effect as one's own success,” so the failure of other is devoutly to be wished. It is a small step from wanting someone else to fail at a particular task to wanting bad thing in general for that person.. I come to associate your disappointment with my pleasure, even when we are not in a zero-sum situation. It is another small step to adopt an adversarial posture all the time. One fails to distinguish between those others who are rivals and those who are not (at least for the moment). Put the two tendencies together and the pattern of behavior that emerges is one of treating virtually everyone as inimical to one's own goals and wishing them ill. “In a competitive culture,” writes Henry, “any body's success at anything is one's own defeat, even though one is completely uninvolved in the success.

Competition encourages us to objectify others, turning them into entities that must be beaten, not humans


At this point, let me recall the distinction between pursuing a goal independently and pursuing it competitively. Obviously the former is not conducive to relationship since interaction is ruled out. My success and your success are totally separate, so I don't have to have anything to do with you. But competition entails a kind of perverse interdependence: out fates are link in that I



cannot success unless you fail. Thus I regard you merely as someone over whom to triumph. Because you are my rival, you are an “it” to me, an object something I use for my own ends. This dynamic is found in virtually all exploitative relationships... But competition takes objectification a step further since I not only use you but try to defeat you. True, you regard me in the same way, and this creates a symmetry that is not present in, say, the boss's relationship to his worker. But it is a fearful symmetry. For competitors, the objectification is doubled; the prospects for relationship are twice buried.

The very nature of competition demands depersonalization.


Depriving adversaries of personalities, of faces, of their subjectivity, is a strategy we automatically adopt in order to win. Some people do this more effectively than others, but the posture is demanded by the very structure of competition. We may try to reassure ourselves with talk about friendly competition,” but the fact remains that seeing another person as a rival and seeing her as a “partner in a living event” are fundamentally incompatible stances. It is difficult to imagine a more telling indictment of an activity than the fact that it demands such depersonalization.

Competition breads contempt

Envy of winners' status & contempt toward the unsuccessful.

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4, p. 141-142

Contempt for other is induced by competition in two ways. First, envy for what the winners have (and bitterness at their having it) easily congeals into enmity.

…

The second kind of contempt...is directed at the losers. It derives from the effort of winners – and here we may specifically point to the economically privileged – to justify their success by maintaining that winning is their natural reward for being winners. This is not a tautology. Certain people are believed to enjoy the status of being winners in advance of actually winning. These winners are good people, not only capable but virtuous, and their victories are therefore always deserved. The corollary is that those who lose deserve their fate, too, and merit only contempt.

...

Despite the outrageous arrogance of this view, winners are sometimes successful in persuading losers of its validity. This has two consequences : (1) the losers' contempt for the winners is mixed with self-contempt, and (2) the losers will set about not to change the system (a move that would in any case be dismissed as “sour grapes”) but only to become a winer next time. Thus



there is no one to press for structural change. The contempt for losers, then, not only tears at the fabric of human relationship but functions as a powerfully conservative force.

Competition and lack of care for others produces dehumanization

Vinluan-Arellano no date cited (Katherine, essayist, “Stop dehumanization of people to stop wars,” http://www.yonip.com/main/articles/nomorewars.html)

A society where human contact, affection and care is withdrawn breeds people who could easily adopt the attitude and practice of dehumanization. Children growing up orphaned or abandoned. Adults so involved in the “rat race” or “dog-eat-dog” world of high competition. Human beings living in isolation from other human beings.

Dehumanization leads to rape, prostitution, and devalues life. This in turn leads to war.

Vinluan-Arellano no date cited (Katherine, essayist, “Stop dehumanization of people to stop wars,” http://www.yonip.com/main/articles/nomorewars.html)

In peace time, dehumanization has led to the acceptance of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia or mercy killing of the old and sick, the legalization of the “right to die,” prostitution, and human cloning.

In war time, dehumanization is a key element in propaganda and brainwashing. By portraying the enemy as less than human, it is much easier to motivate your troops to rape, torture or kill. Ethnic cleansing or genocide would always be perceived as a crime against humanity if human beings belonging to another race or religion are not dehumanized.

Cooperation encourages positive interaction, as experience shows


Even in a mercilessly competitive society, there are pockets of cooperative activity – enough, at least, so that each of us knows what it is to work with others to paint a room, prepare a report, cook a meal. To remember such experiences is to know that cooperation encourages us to view out collaborators favorably; it is to understand how cooperation teaches us, more roadle readily?, the value of relationship. Cooperation means that the success of each participant is linked to that of every other. This structure tends to lead to mutual assistance and support, which in turn, predisposes cooperators for feel and affinity for one another. At the very least, cooperation offers an opportunity to interact positively (which independent effort does not and which competition actively discourages); at the most, it provides and irresistible inducement to do so.

General Welfare

Link to cooperation:


http://www.yonip.com/main/articles/nomorewars.html

http://www.yonip.com/main/articles/nomorewars.html


Cooperation results naturally from looking out for the group’s welfare.


When we compete, we do so out of a primary concern for our own welfare. If the welfare in question is instead that of a group of people, then cooperation follows naturally. Working together as a group would not be a strategy for maximizing individual gain but a logical consequence of thinking in terms of what benefits all of us. Will I lose in order that the group will gain? Sometimes such a trade off will occur, but it will not be seen as catastrophic. More to the point, this question would not even occur to someone whose world view is different from our own. It would seem as odd as your feet asking whether the body as a whole benefits from jogging at their expense.



Individualism

Definitions

Individualism - political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. (Encyclopedia Britannica Online) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/286303/individualism

- A doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group. (Answers.com) http://www.answers.com/topic/individualism

Conformity - Agreement between an individual's behavior and a group's standards or expectations. A conformist is one who follows the majority's desires or standards. - (The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conformity

General Quotes

"Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law." -- Ayn Rand

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)." -- Ayn Rand

"Collectivism requires self-sacrifice, the subordination of one's interests to those of others." -- Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand

"Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value." -- Mark Da Cunha

"Freedom is an intellectual achievement which requires disavowal of collectivism and embrace of individualism." -- Onkar Ghate

Competition shapes conformist robots

George Leonard, “Winning isn’t Everything. It’s Nothing” p. 46

“A culture dedicated to creating standardized, specialized, predictable human components could find no better way of grinding them out than by making every possible aspect of life a matter of competition. ‘Winning out’ in this respect does not make rugged individualists. It shapes conformist robots.”

Emphasis on competition produces conformity

Arthur Combs, Myths in Education, p. 19

“Competition can only work if people agree to seek the same goals and follow the same rules. Accordingly, as competitors strive to beat each other’s records, they tend to become more alike. If total conformity is what we want in our society, worshiping competition is one effective way to get it.”

Negative Brief Values/Criteria: Individualism

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conformity

http://www.answers.com/topic/individualism

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/286303/individualism


Competition dampens individualistic creativity

Alfie Kohn, No Contest, p. 130

“I noted that competition dampens creativity. This is partly because the pressure to outdo someone else tends to make us conservative. We do not want to risk anything that could endanger our victory. Thus the music critic Will Crutchfield finds that piano competitions result in interpretation that are ‘all too similar to one another.’ In trying to win, performers concentrate on making no mistake but ‘shy away…from the big technical risks, the truly astonishing effects.’ [Crutchfield, Ills of Piano Competitions] Creativity is anti-conformist at its core; it is nothing if not a process of idiosyncratic thinking and risk-taking. Competition inhibits this process.”

Competition is responsible for conformity in students

Jules Henry (American Anthropologist at Columbia University, and the University of Chicago)

“In order not to fail most students are willing to believe anything and [not to care] whether what they are told is true or false.”

Cooperation thrives on diversity

Alfie Kohn, No Contest, p. 211

“Notice that none of this analysis supports the idea that children should –or, with CL [Cooperative Learning], do—become interchangeable members of a collective, relinquishing their selves to some amorphous blob of a group. It is competition that creates conformity; cooperation thrives on the diversity of its participants and the distinct contributions made by each.”

Cooperation encourages discussion, which is a way of exploring new ideas

Michael Marland (British Educator)

“Talking is not merely a way of conveying existing ideas to others; it is also a way by which we explore ideas, clarify them and make them their own.”

Competition encourages uniformity, not individualism


But competition does not promote the more substantial and authentic kind of individualism. On the contrary, it encourages rank conformity. Here is George Leonard: “A culture dedicated to creating standardized, specialized, predictable human components could find no better way of grinding them out than by making every possible aspect of life a matter of competition. 'Winning out' in this respect does not make rugged individualists. It shapes conformist robots.”



This is quite logical since one can speak of outdoing others only if one is dong the same thing they are. Apples are not better than oranges; one can make relative judgments only about like quantities. As Arthur Combs put it, “competition can only work if people agree to seek the same goals and follow the same rules. Accordingly, as competitors strive to beat each other's records, they tend to become more alike. If total conformity is what we want in our society, worshiping competition is one effective way to et it.” Notice that this is not simply an empirical observation (“people tend to act alike when they compete”) but an analysis of the nature of competition. Unique characteristics by definition cannot be ranked, and participation in the process of ranking demands essential conformity.



Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic motivation

Explanation of Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from within oneself or the activity one is pursuing. We are intrinsically motivated when we do things because we like doing them, or because we feel they are the right thing for us to do. If you're motivated by a sense of duty or feelings of kindness, you are intrinsically motivated.

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, comes from outside, and is generally related to one's degree of success, or failure. You are extrinsically motivated if you do something in the hope of receiving pay, or a prize, or for fear of being punished.

Cooperation is a form of Intrinsic motivation

Cooperation is based upon a mutual, voluntary agreement to work together. The most common reason people choose to do this is because they believe the task would be more enjoyable or successfully accomplished if done with others. These are both signs if intrinsic motivation. Additionally, cooperation builds a team dynamic, encouraging people to help each other and build a sense of duty towards one another, which is one of the most powerful forms of intrinsic motivation.

Competition is a form of Extrinsic motivation

This should be fairly obvious. Competition is supposed to motivate us by linking our success or failure with the receipt of some prize, or compensation. This is clearly extrinsic motivation.

Competition = extrinsic


“The reward for extrinsically motivated behavior is something that is separate from and follows the behavior. With competitive activities, the reward is typically 'winning' (that is, beating the other person or the other team), so the reward is actually extrinsic to the activity itself.

Extrinsic motivators aren't as motivating, and eat away intrinsic motivation.


Like any other extrinsic motivator, competition cannot produce the kind of results that flow from enjoying the activity itself. But this only tells half the story. The use of extrinsic motivators actually tends to undermine intrinsic motivation and thus adversely affect performance in the long run. The introduction of, say, monetary reward will edge out intrinsic satisfaction; once this reward is withdrawn, the activity may well cease even though no reward at all was necessary for

Negative Brief Values/Criteria: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic motivation


its performance earlier. Money may work to 'buy off' one's intrinsic motivation for an activity. Extrinsic motivators, in other words, are not only ineffective but corrosive. They eat away at the kind of motivation that does produce results.”

Intrinsic motivation produces the best performances

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4, p.60

We do best at the tasks we enjoy. An outside or extrinsic motivator (money, grades, the trappings of competitive success) simply cannot take the place of an activity we find rewarding in itself. “While extrinsic motivation may effect performance,” wrote Margaret Clifford, “performance is dependent upon learning, which in turn is primarily dependent upon intrinsic motivation.” More specifically, “a significant performance-increase on a highly complex task will be dependent upon intrinsic motivation.” In fact, even people who are judged to be high in achievement motivation do not perform well unless extrinsic motivation has been minimized, as several studies have shown.

Competition is an extrinsic motivator, thus it doesn't work as well.


Competition works just as any other extrinsic motivator does. As Edward Deci, one of the leading students of this topic, has written, “The reward for extrinsically motivated behavior is something that is separate from and follows the behavior. With competitive activities, the reward is typically 'winning' (that is, beating the other person or the other team), so the reward is actually extrinsic to the activity itself.” This has been corroborated by subjective reposts: people who are more competitive regard themselves as being extrinsically motivated. Like any other extrinsic motivator, competition cannot produce the kind of results that flow from enjoying the activity itself.

Extrinsic motivators adversely affect performance in the long run


But this only tells half the story. As research by Deci and others has shown, the use of extrinsic motivators actually tends to undermine intrinsic motivation and thus adversely affect performance in the long run. The introduction of, say, monetary reward will edge out intrinsic satisfaction; once this reward is withdrawn, the activity may well cease even though no reward at all was necessary for its performance earlier. Money “may work to 'buy off' one's intrinsic motivation for an activity. And this decreased motivation appears (from the results of the field experiment) to be more than just a temporary phenomenon.” Extrinsic motivators, in other words, are not only ineffective but corrosive. They eat away at the kind of motivation that does produce results.

Negative Brief Values/Criteria: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic motivation


Motivation

Competition only motivates if we believe we can win [122/186]


Motivation depends on the belief that it is possible to achieve a particular goal. We have all heard coaches say that you will not be able to do something until you believe you can do it. Of course, the coaches are correct, but their advice is based on an oversimplified conception of how a person’s beliefs are formed. Beliefs are not suddenly manufactured in a locker room before a game. They are built on past experiences combined with personal definitions of the nature of the task being undertaken.

Examples illustrating how perceived chances of success influence motivation are not difficult to find. For example, a student who sees no chance for obtaining a satisfactory grade on a test will not be motivated to study. And if a tennis player faces someone who hits aces on every serve and passing shots on every service return, motivation soon disappears. We have all felt a lack of motivation when we faced a competitive situation in which our chances for success were zero.

The point here is simple: competition will destroy motivation when there are no perceived chances for success.

Goals other than competitive success better maintain motivation [81]


This is why coaches of weak teams try to convince their players that a victory is always possible if they will only try hard enough. If players don’t believe them, as often happens, the coaches try to produce motivation be making pride an issue or by setting goals apart from winning. Some coaches are good at this, and they re able to maintain the motivation of their players through losing seasons simply by focusing attention on the achievement of goals other than competitive success.

Competition creates motivation for simple activities, destroys it for difficult ones. [74/179]

Coakley, Jay J., Ph.D., Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, “Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies,” fourth edition, 1990, Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing, St. Louis, MO. ISBN 0-8016-0304-8 GV706.5.C63, pp. 74

When an activity is simple, competition will generally enhance motivation and performance output (Cratty 1973; Gross and gill, 1982). Simple activities are usually those requiring the use of physical force (like lifting weights), uncomplicated motor skills (like riding a stationary bike), or easily mastered cognitive operations (like adding “2” to a series of numbers). These are boring tasks, and competition simply makes them more interesting by adding a reason to

Negative Brief Values/Criteria: Motivation


perform them well.When an activity is complex (like trying to assemble your new personal computer), or when it involves unfamiliar actions (like trying to wind surf for the first time), or when it requires difficult cognitive operations (like trying to solve a complicated calculus problem), competition will generally destroy motivation.…The relationship between competition and motivation is often positive in sport because most sport activities are relatively simple. They demand endurance, strength, and basic physical skills. However, when sport skills are underdeveloped, or when competition becomes extremely anxiety-provoking, both the level of the participants’ motivation and the quality of their performances are likely to be low.

The motivation to do well is different than the motivation to win

Beating someone is a compensatory way to feel good about oneself in replacement of confidence or actual ability.


Doing well, as we saw earlier, is different from doing better than others. This is nowhere clearer than in the case of their respective motivations. All of us enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from being particularly good at something. Sometimes it is convenient to assess that performance by comparing it to those of other people. But the individual who feels good about herself and is simply interested in doing well does not go out of her way to outperform others. She does not seek out relative judgments. She is content with a sense of personal satisfaction, sometimes buttressed, depending on the activity, by a consideration of absolute standards. (She can check out the number of questions she answered correctly or see how long it took her to run a mile.) The desire to be better than others feels quite different from this desire to do well. There is something inherently compensatory about it. One wants to outdo in order to make up for an impression, often dimly sensed, of personal inadequacy. Unlike the joy of flexing one's muscles or intelligence, which is sufficient unto itself, one wants to be stronger or smarter than others in order to convince oneself at some level that one is a good person.

Prosperity:

Turn:Link: prosperity = economic growth

“Prosperity: an economic state of growth with rising profits and full employment” – wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Impact: Growth propagates an unfair income distribution

Karl E. Case (professor of economics at Wellesly College) & Ray C. Fair (prof. Of econ at Yale),



“Principles of Economics”, © 2002, www.prenhall.com/casefair

“One cause of growth is capital accumulation. Capital investment requires saving, and saving comes mostly from the rich. The rich save more than the poor, and in the developing countries most people are poor and need to use whatever income they have for survival.

“Critics also claim that the real beneficiaries of growth are the rich. Choices open to the “haves” in society are greatly enhanced, bur the choices open to the “have-nots” remain severely limited. If the benefits of growth trickle down to the poor, why are there more homeless today than there were 20 years ago?”

Quality

Economic competition doesn't improve quality or safety because they're not visible attributes. If people can't easily compare an attribute, it's hard to compete on it, because competition requires comparison. It can lower costs because those are easy to compare. But the easiest way to lower costs is to lower quality. Since quality is an invisible attribute (at least at the time of purchase) it will not be competed on as much as price, and will therefore suffer at the hands of price cuts.

Beating others and doing quality work are two completely different concepts


The growing clamor to make hospitals, school, industries, and now even government more “competitive” raises once again the question of whether this goal has anything to do with reaching excellence, or whether we have simply blurred the two ideas, overlooking what should be an obvious fact — that beating others and doing quality work are two completely different concepts. Whether the first leads to the second is a legitimate question, but the answer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that it almost always does not.

Rational Self-interest

Cooperation is the natural result even if we only look out for ourselves, if we consider the long-run.

The tragedy of the commons shows one aspect of this.


Shifting to a concern for the group's welfare, which constitutes a change of goals, involves a radically different way of looking at the world. But even if we keep our individualism intact, an inquiry into various strategies for satisfying ourselves suggests that competition still makes little sense. The practice of trying to beat others, which derives from the assumption that my success


http://www.prenhall.com/casefair


depends on your failure, is productive only in the short run. If we evaluate our success over the long haul – a relatively modest shift in perspective that continues to ignore the question of what is best for the group – working together often benefits us as individuals.

Consider Garret Hardin's notion of the “tragedy of the commons.” From the perspective of each cattle farmer with access to a public pasture, it is sensible to keep adding animals to his herd. But the same reasoning that makes this decision seem sensible to one individual will make it seem sensible to all individuals. Each will pursue his self-interest, the grass will be depleted, and everyone will lose. (If the first, the process would simply be accelerated; the more competition the faster everyone loses.) In order to see this, we must adopt the perspective of the group. But even if we adopt this perspective temporarily, with our ultimate purpose still being to benefit each individual, it becomes clear that cooperation is more productive.

Morals should be thought of with respect to the long run and society at large


A more accurate distinction is between the particular interest of a contending group and the general interest of society at large. The realm of morals is identified with this regard for the general interest. Another distinction that has real value is the short view as contrasted with the long view. A moral judgment of any social action is concerned with its ultimate effect rather than with its immediate objective.

Success

De-Link: success doesn't have to equal beating someone. See also Victory.

Success can be defined without competition. Many goals, i.e., writing a book, can be set without thinking about comparing it with anyone else.


But success and competition are not at all the same thing. Put plainly, one can set and reach goals — to prove to one’s own and others’ satisfaction that one is competent — without ever competing. “Success in achieving a goal does not depend upon winning over others just as failing to achieve a goal does not mean losing to others.” A moment’s reflection reveals this as an undeniable truth. I can succeed in knitting a scarf or writing a book without ever trying to make it better than yours. Better yet, I can work with you — say, to prepare a dinner or build a house. Many people take the absence of competition to mean that one must be wandering aimlessly, without and goals. But competition simply means that one is working toward a goal in such a way as to prevent others from reaching their goals. This is one approach to getting something done, but (happily) not the only one. Competition need never enter the picture in order for skills to be mastered and displayed, goals set and met.




Victory:

Impact Turn: Victory != excellence because it only requires us to beat someone else, not achieve a standard. It can also distract us from excellence.

Pursuing victory is counter-productive to achieving excellence.John McMurty (quoted by William O. Johnson, From Here to 2000, p446):

“Actually, the pursuit of victory works to reduce the chance for excellence in the true performance of the sport. It tends to distract our attention from excellence of performance by rendering it subservient to emerging victorious. I suspect that our conventional mistake of presuming the opposite---presuming that the contest-for-prize- framework and excellence of performance are somehow related as a unique cause and effect---may be the deepest-lying prejudice of civilized thought.”

Victory can distract from looking for excellenceKohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 56

It is true, of course, that the relative quality of performance is what determines who wins in a competition, but this does not mean that competition makes for better performance. This is partly because those who believe they will lose may see little point in trying hard. The same is true for those who feel sure of winning. But even where there is enough uncertainty involved to avoid these problems, the fact remains that attending to the quest for triumph, to victory as such, to who is ahead at the moment, actually distracts one from the pure focus on what one is doing. Helmreich proposes this as one explanation for his surprising discovery that competition is counterproductive in the real world: “Competitive individuals might...focus so heavily on outshining others and putting themselves forward that they lose track of the scientific issues and produce research that is more superficial and less sustained in direction.” And more succinctly: “They may become so preoccupied with winning...that they become distracted from the task at hand.”

Competition produces elitism, only improves those who are already good [26/72]


A heavy emphasis on competitive reward structures in sport produces results very similar to what happens in classrooms where strict grading curves are used: the best athletes are encouraged to excel, average athletes get frustrated at the scarcity of rewards, and the poorest athletes drop out. Therefore if excellence is defined in terms of the overall accomplishments of the general population, competition may have negative consequences because it tends to create elitism.



Applications:

Business

Business is a miracle of cooperation.

The Economist, “The silence of Mammon”, Dec 17th 2009, http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15125372

The first is that business is a remarkable exercise in co-operation. For all the talk of competition “red in tooth and claw”, companies in fact depend on persuading large numbers of people—workers and bosses, shareholders and suppliers—to work together to a common end. This involves getting lots of strangers to trust each other. It also increasingly involves stretching that trust across borders and cultures. Apple’s iPod is not just a miracle of design. It is also a miracle of co-operation, teaming Californian designers with Chinese manufacturers and salespeople in all corners of the earth. It is worth remembering that the word “company” is derived from the Latin words “cum” and “pane”—meaning “breaking bread together”.

Competition takes focus away from doing the best for customers

Grace Augustine (research associate with the William Davidson Institute, an educational institute focused on researching and supporting organizations in emerging markets. She writes for the NextBillion blog and has an interest in economic development and clean technology for the world’s poorest citizens), “Competition vs. Cooperation at the Base of the Pyramid”, Stanford Social Innovation Review, January 14, 2009 10:00 AM, http://www.ssireview.org/opinion/entry/competition_vs_cooperation_at_the_base_of_the_pyramid_bop/

However, as organizations working at the BoP compete, their focus can shift – from the customer to the competitor. If competition is not dealt with properly, it becomes a battle of resources and reputation, instead of a fight to serve the poor in the best way possible.

Competition changes businesses focus


From my perch at the William Davidson Institute, I have seen that as competition heightens, resources and energy shift away from improving direct delivery of goods and services towards building legitimacy in established markets. Leaders tell their teams: we have to have a case study written about us; it is time to re-brand ourselves; our Web site needs a facelift; why don’t we try

Negative Brief Applications: Applications:

http://www.wdi.umich.edu/About/

http://www.ssireview.org/opinion/entry/competition_vs_cooperation_at_the_base_of_the_pyramid_bop/




http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15125372


to co-brand with a company, etc.

Competition for workers may put them in less productive positions.


Take talent, for example. The war for talented individuals with the skills and the passion to work at the BoP is intense. If an employee at a U.S. intermediary organization were to decide that he or she may be better suited for a project on the ground, how likely is it that his or her employer would say, “Oh yes, that sounds great, we want you to have the greatest impact possible.”

It is much more likely that the organization would do everything in its power to hold on to that highly-skilled person, regardless of whether or not it resulted in the greatest good for society. This is partially because we believe that our organization, and our cause, with which have sacrificed so much for, must be doing the most good.

Negative Brief Applications: Applications:




Cold War

USSR vs US space race was hampered by competition, and may not even have been a good thing.

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4, p. 241 (footnote)

Thus, for example, we might question the assumption that the United States was able to put a man on the moon as soon as it did by virtue of being in a race with the USSR. Rather than inspiring excellence, the fact of being in a contest meant that each country was struggling with problems that the other country had already solved. Competition in general is distinguished by just such redundancy; it is inherently wasteful; since each rival cannot benefit from what the other knows. (Of course, the space-race example overlooks the question of whether putting someone on the moon was worth the enormous expense in the first place. That, not coincidentally, is exactly the kind of question that people almost never ask when they are in a race.)

The failure of the USSR doesn't mean competition works.


The dissolution of the Soviet Union has led a lot of American sot construct the following syllogism: since (a) our economic system is based on competition, (b) their system collapsed, and (c) we were rivals, this must mean that (d) competition works. It would take considerably more space than I have been allotted here to offer a serious challenge to this rather dubious bit of deduction. Suffice it to say that the very adversarial nature of th relationship between the two countries — competition writ large, in other words — has had a great deal to do with trouble experienced on both sides of he old iron curtain. Of course, many factors played a part in sinking communism, but if we are looking for a simple explanation, we wold do well to focus not on the absence of competition but on the absence of the Soviet citizen’s commitment to his or her work, chiefly due to the lack of personal autonomy and genuine democracy in that country.

Negative Brief Applications: Cold War


Constitutional Convention

CX: Is the Constitution excellent?

IMPACT: If yes, it's because they eventually cooperated.

The Constitutional Convention got nothing done because they wouldn't compromise

Clarence B. Carson, historian, PhD from Vanderbuilt University, “Basic American Government,” 1993, American Textbook Committee, ISBN 1-931789-19-3

“[Benjamin] Franklin contributed most to the convention by avuncular admonitions to the delegates to compromise, to compose their differences, and to put aside so much of their personal desires as might be necessary to accomplish to object at hand. When the convention appeared to be nearly breaking up over the question of equal or proportional representation, Doctor Franklin said: 'When a broad table is to be made, and edges of plans do not fit, the artist takes a little form both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here both sides must part with some of their demands, in order that they may join in some accommodating proposition.'”

IMPACT: Compromise is cooperative; it was the lack of cooperation that made the Constitutional Convention take so long.

Compromise of 1787 (Bicameral legislature):

The bicameral or two house legislature of the United States Congress is the result of a compromise between supporters of the “New Jersey Plan,” who favored a legislature in which all states were equally represented, and supporters of the “Virginia Plan” in which representatives were awarded in proportion to population. A delegate from Connecticut, Rodger Sherman, proposed what became known as the “Great Compromise” or the Connecticut Compromise of 1787. This compromise balanced the concerns of both factions by creating a bicameral legislature comprised of a House and a Senate. This compromise served a two-fold purpose, both securing widespread support within the Constitutional Convention and creating what was, in the eyes of the founders, a more effective means of government. The House was designed to be receptive to the demands of the people, whereas the Senate was that house in which legislatures could debate and more deeply consider the effects of legislation.

Negative Brief Applications: Constitutional Convention


Credit Cards:

Summary: We buy almost everything with credit cards these days. They have made purchasing more convenient, faster, and possible in more different ways than anything since paper money. And they require cooperation between banks, stores, and companies, or they wouldn't work.

Credit cards are made useful by cooperation

Bryan Caplan and Edward Stringham, (Department of Economics and Center for Study of Public Choice George Mason University), “Networks, Anarcho-Capitalism, and the Paradox of Cooperation”

The credit card industry has all the defining characteristics of a network industry. (Carlton and Frankel, 1995; Economides, 1995; Evans and Schmalensee, 1995, 1999) There are links and nodes between consumers, merchants, and their banks, and there are significant network effects, as the value of a credit card increases with the network size. Evans and Schmalensee (1999, p.138) describe, “[P]ayment cards are provided through a network industry in which participants are linked economically in unusual ways. Payment cards are useless to consumers unless merchants accept them, but merchants have no reason to accept cards unless consumers carry them and want to use them.” From the consumer’s perspective a payment card is more valuable if widely accepted, so issuers will wish to be part of a large network.

Credit card issuers devote much of their energy to cooperation.


Visa and MasterCard are not-for-profit membership corporations comprised of thousands of member firms and finance their services with membership fees. (Hausman et al, 1999) They provide infrastructure and a large network of users, which increase the value of individuals’ cards. As Cowen would expect, competing credit card issuers devote much of their energy to cooperation.

Credit card cooperation is welfare enhancing


To the extent that there is cooperation it is welfare enhancing and is not used for collusion.

Cooperation was required to start credit card companies


Negative Brief Applications: Credit Cards:


Visa originated in 1966 when the Bank of America licensed its card nationally and shortly spun off its franchise system to create a nonstock membership corporation (Evans and Schmalensee, 1999, p.66). MasterCard has similar origins. It was a cooperative effort because they had to induce many banks, many merchants, and many consumers to use the card. Laffont and Tirole (2000, p.180) write: Consider the joint ventures Visa and MasterCard in the credit card industry. These associations are each owned by thousands of member banks, which compete for customers on one side of the market and for merchants on the other side. The merchant’s bank, the ‘acquirer,’ and the customer’s bank, the ‘issuer,’ must be bound by an interconnection agreement if the transaction between the customer and the merchant is to use a Visa or a MasterCard.

Credit cards cooperate without colluding


In a transaction in the Visa and MasterCard networks are four parties: the consumer, the merchant, and their two respective banks. Consumers are able to choose which credit card to carry, merchants able to choose which types of payments they accept, and their banks are able to choose whether to join the Visa and MasterCard networks. Each of these seemingly disparate parties is able to have dealings with each other without giving birth to a collusive mega-network. (Stringham, 1999)

Negative Brief Applications: Credit Cards:


Credit Unions:

Summary: Credit Unions are not-for-profit, cooperative alternatives to banks. Precisely because they don't seek profits, they are able to offer higher interest rates on savings, lower rates on loans, and generally lower fees for banking services. In addition, they often work to educate people about the best way to manage their finances. This because they are driven by cooperative effort, not competition for profits.

The Credit Union Philosophy:

“not for profit, not for charity, but for service,"

Credit unions offer better rates to customersBrett Arends, “For Better Banking, Check Out a Credit Union,” The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121978460014474069.html

"Credit unions very often beat their banking counterparts in terms of offering lower rates on loans and higher rates on deposits," says Greg McBride, economist for Bankrate.com. "For a consumer who's shopping around for the best deal, that has to include looking at credit unions."

Lower rates are the result of not having to seek out profit.Brett Arends, “For Better Banking, Check Out a Credit Union,” The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121978460014474069.html

In normal times, credit unions boasted that they could offer a better deal than banks because they didn't have to make profits for outside shareholders.

Of course, these days the same goes for a lot of traditional banks as well. Instead, the new "no longer in profit" (NLIP) sector is losing billions. Big banks are currently passing the hat around Wall Street, Washington, Singapore and Dubai looking for help.

So instead many credit unions can boast that they don't have to pay for billions in losses on subprime mortgages and other bad loans. As an added bonus, few of them waste money on expensive marketing and advertising campaigns, takeovers, huge executive bonuses, and the kind of costly "growth" initiatives that CEOs chase to give their stock options on Wall Street the needed juice.

Credit unions look out for members interestsCredit Union National Assoctiation http://www.creditunion.coop/history/cu_philosophy.html

In 1935, when credit unions were helping Americans through the Great Depression, the treasurer of a Midwestern credit union said that credit unions were "not for profit, not for charity, but for service," and that philosophy holds true today.

Negative Brief Applications: Credit Unions:

http://www.creditunion.coop/history/cu_philosophy.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121978460014474069.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121978460014474069.html


Credit unions continue to look out for their members’ interests and provide a level of service that is not generally available at other financial institutions. Whether it’s providing a loan to help a member cover unexpected medical bills, giving financial counseling to a member whose company closed its doors, or simply offering a better deal on a used car loan, credit unions make a difference for their members and the communities they serve.

Negative Brief Applications: Credit Unions:


Debate

Summary: Debate would lose all educational value if we dropped coop, it would only lose the win/lose structure if we lost competition.

See Also: Subsumption / Balanced Neg

The goal of debate should be learning, putting winning first is unacceptable.

Mike Larimer, NCFCA President, National Christian Forensics & Communications Association President’s Letter, July 2009

Competition refines speaking and thinking skills in a way that other activities simply cannot match. The pursuit of excellence which accompanies fair and honest competition, in its purest sense, does a great job of preparing our students to engage the culture. But if the awards and accolades become the goal instead of the training we should impart, then at its best the trophies are hollow and at its worst we’ve made an idol of this activity. If those of us who are coaches and leaders lose sight of this fact, then we’ve also set the stage for the students to follow our example and pursue questionable practices in the name of winning. This is unacceptable and compromises the vision for the league.

Negative Brief Applications: Debate


Education

See Also: ability (value)

Summary: A common affirmative argument that is coming out is the idea that education has been crippled by cooperation and would be aided greatly by an increase in competition. Primarily the argument here is that public schools (funded by the government and thus somehow tied to cooperation) are failing and that an increase in competition through vouchers would increase the efficacy of public schools. We'll examine this one at a time.

1. The unique link between cooperation and public schools is tenuous. Private schools of all kinds require structural cooperation.

2. American education is not the nightmare it is portrayed to be.

3. American education is not outpaced by other countries on the basis we have public funds for education.

4. A cooperative learning style increases the learning ability.

5. Increased competition between private and public schools through vouchers will not improve either.

American classrooms are fundamentally competitive


I have already argued that few values are more persistently promoted in American classrooms than the desirability of trying to beat other people. Sometimes this lesson is presented with all the subtlety of a fist in the face, as with the use of spelling bees, grades on a curve (a version of artificial scarcity in which my chance of receiving an A is reduced by your getting one), awards assemblies, and other practices that redefine the majority of children as losers.

At other times, competition is promoted tacitly, perhaps even unwittingly, by pitting students against one another for the teacher’s attention and approval. This may occur through the use of manipulative behavior management strategies – for example, a public announcement such as : “I like the way Joanne is sitting so nice and quiet.” (A contest has been created for Nicest, Quietest Pupil, and everyone except Joanne has just lost.) Or it may follow from the conventional arrangement of asking a question of the whole class.

Explanation of CL

University of Minnesota, “What is cooperative Learning?”, November 2009. http://www.co-operation.org/

Cooperative Learning is a relationship in a group of students that requires positive

Negative Brief Applications: Education

http://www.co-operation.org/

http://www.co-operation.org/


interdependence (a sense of sink or swim together), individual accountability (each of us has to contribute and learn), interpersonal skills (communication, trust, leadership, decision making, and conflict resolution)

Cooperative Learning successful at promoting achievement

[US Government] Office of Research,“Cooperative Learning”, June 1992. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/cooplear.html

Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement.

CL being used in England

BBC News, “Education, Summer Schools to Help Ethnic Minority Pupils”, 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/341212.stm

The project will focus on the development of specific skills within two areas of study with a particular emphasis on problem solving, active and co-operative learning.

English universities promoting cooperation (with France!)

BBC News, “Cross-channel University to open”, February 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/2724205.stm

The University of Kent says that it will contribute to the economic development to regions on both sides of the English Channel. And it is intended to "provide an international focus for higher education co-operation between Britain and France".

English universities cheap and doing well.

The Economist, “University Students Abroad”, November 2009. http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14927238

Overseas students increased at a sharper rate, rising by more than 20%. Many more foreign students—those from the European Union pay the same tuition fees as their British counterparts whereas those from other countries are charged far more—are now enrolled on British campuses. A weaker pound should make the prospect more attractive. Tuition fees and accommodation at an elite institution in Britain cost international students about £18,000 a year—roughly the same as in Australia and less than in America, where costs are closer to £24,000.

Negative Brief Applications: Education

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14927238

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/2724205.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/341212.stm

http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/cooplear.html


Healthcare

Competition increases deaths in health care

BBC News, "NHS competition 'costs lives'”, 29 January 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2701899.stm

The rate of deaths from emergency admissions for heart attacks was used to determine quality of care. This measure is widely used in the United States.

They [Professor Carol Popper and colleagues at Bristol University's Centre for Market and Public Organisation] compared death rates in those hospitals with no local competition - one in three trusts - with those that had to compete for business.

They found the death rates among these patients were much the same in the early 1990s.

However, they discovered death rates started to vary once competition took hold in the health service.

According to their study, death rates were highest in those areas that had to compete for business.

Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic cooperate, and it's the most efficient hospital in America.

Jerry Adler and Jeneen Interlandi, “The Hospital That Could Cure Health Care”, NEWSWEEK, Nov 27, 2009 http://www.newsweek.com/id/224585/page/1

As Cosgrove [CEO Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a former cardiac surgeon] told a Senate hearing in June, the [Cleveland] [C]linic's business practices offer a potential model for the American health-care industry as it strains to bend the ever-rising cost curve. The evidence was in the 2008 Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which reported that of the five medical centers ranked best by U.S. News in 2007, Cleveland Clinic provided the most cost-efficient care, measured by expenses incurred during the last two years of life—$31,252, nearly 50 percent below the most expensive. The clinic's distinctive feature is that in contrast to most other American hospitals, where doctors are essentially autonomous professionals, at the clinic physicians work on fixed salaries and yearly contracts. An outsider might describe this relationship as "employer-employee," although Cosgrove [CEO Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, a former cardiac surgeon] prefers a teamwork analogy; he calls Cleveland Clinic "the world's second-largest group practice" (after Mayo Clinic, which is organized similarly). This saves money in many small ways, such as on expenses for medical supplies and devices. "Because we're all on a team," says Dr. Joseph Sabik, chairman of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, "instead of stocking 30 different heart valves, we can stock two or three, and unless there's a good medical reason to do otherwise, that's what we use." And it saves money in one large way, by divorcing doctors' income from the number of procedures they perform. That, in turn, reduces the incentive for unnecessary tests, whose cost to the economy was estimated at $210 billion a year in a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Competition between medical insurance companies wastes $210 billion every year.

Negative Brief Applications: Healthcare

http://www.newsweek.com/id/224585/page/1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2701899.stm



The same study estimated that another $210 billion is wasted each year on medical paperwork. That, though, is one potential savings that has mostly eluded Cosgrove. At the clinic's patients' accounts office, rows of cubicles are piled high with file folders and printouts, testimony to its dealings with thousands of different health plans from hundreds of insurance companies all over the country. Thousands of times a day, clerks pick up the phone and get put on hold like anyone else who calls an insurance company. Industry estimates put the average cost of handling a phone call at $3, to each party. This is the hidden cost of competition; whatever else a government-run health-insurance system would accomplish, it would impose a uniform billing system on the current one, in which clinic's 2,000 doctors require 1,400 clerks to handle their billing.

Cooperating drove down costs of medical care for Duke University


But in 2006 Cleveland Clinic abandoned the traditional departments in favor of 25 "institutes" organized by disease or organ system. This works well for patients, who don't care whether their back pain is cured by a rheumatologist, a neurologist, or an orthopedic surgeon. But, says Regina Herzlinger, an expert in health-care economics at Harvard Business School, it runs afoul of the dominant fee-for-service system of medical billing, which discourages cooperation across fields. When Duke University Medical Center set up a disease-management system for congestive heart failure, coordinating the efforts of cardiologists, primary-care doctors, pharmacists, and nurse practitioners, it drove down the cost of treatment by 40 percent in a single year, while reducing readmissions and improving outcomes. But that highlighted the central paradox of health-care economics: a patient's "cost" is the hospital's "revenue." The unintended result of the Duke experiment, says Herzlinger, was that the unit lost tens of millions of dollars a year. The chief beneficiaries were the insurance companies, which saved on reimbursements.

Eliminating competition between doctors drove up quality.


At Cleveland Clinic, by contrast, the institute system worked because all its doctors were already on salary. This eliminates the competition for patients between departments, and the incentive for doctors to perform additional tests and procedures. The system also "drives our quality up," Cosgrove says, because it frees doctors to concentrate on their practices, not the minutiae of running a small business

Competing private insurers waste money on health-care.








But a visit to Cleveland Clinic makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that if you're looking for "waste" in the health-care system—defined as expenses that do not directly contribute to medical outcomes—a good place to look is the nation's cobbled-together system of competing private insurers. Nissen, who considers himself less bound by the need for circumspection, points out that "the overhead for private insurers is 29 percent. For Medicare, it's 3 percent. If what's left over is what you can spend on patients, I think 97 percent is a much better deal."

Competition may lower quality in heatlh care

Vicki Fong (Penn State University), 8 April 2005, "Health care competition may not result in better quality", Public Health News

For several decades, competition within the health care industry has been touted as the way to curb rising prices by reducing inefficient practices and improving quality and safety. But a study of 341 HMOs suggests that more competition may not automatically solve price and quality-of-care problems as hoped for by legislators, regulators and employers.

"Our findings show that less, not more, competition was associated with better health plan performance in several -- though not all--factors," says lead author Dennis Scanlon, associate professor of health policy administration at Penn State. "This finding seems counterintuitive, but it is possible that more HMO competition may result in providers finding it difficult to respond to competing quality initiatives. Also, competition may be focused more on driving down the plans' premiums, resulting in less attention to quality."

Zero Sum competition in health care reduces value

Michael E. Porter (University Professor, Harvard Business School), Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg (Associate Professor of Business Administration, Darden Graduate School of BusinessThe University of Virginia), "Redefining Health Care: Identifying the Root Causes", Harvard Business School, May 2006

Health care competition is not focused on delivering value for patients. Instead, it has become zero sum: the system participants struggle to divide value when they could be increasing it. Although health care offers tremendous value, the unnecessary costs of zero-sum competition undermine and erode that value. It is the zero-sum competition in health care that has created the unacceptable results detailed in Scoping the Problem: high costs, low or variable quality, under- and overtreatment, too many preventable errors in diagnosis and treatment, restrictions on choice, rationing of services, limited access, and a raft of costly lawsuits.

Zero-sum competition in health care is manifested in a number of ways, none of which creates value for patients:

Competition to shift costsCompetition to increase bargaining powerCompetition to capture patients and restrict choiceCompetition to reduce costs by restricting services



Competition bad for health care


A similar dynamic is now at work in the field of health care, where many institutions are being pressured for the first time to become “competitive”. More hospitals and clinics are being run be for-profit corporations; many institutions, forced to battle for “customers,” seem to value a skilled director of marketing more highly than a skilled caregiver. As in any other economic sector, the race for profits translates into pressure to reduce costs, and the easiest way to do it here is to cut back on services to unprofitable patients, that is, those who are more sick than rich.

This is exactly what insurance companies are doing under the banner of “competitiveness”; denying coverage to those who need it most. In many cases, there is not even any greater efficiency to show for the greater inequity. “Among providers, competition has led to a stunning round of spending on facilities and equipment in an attempt to lure pations form other providers — and never mind if the new facilities are [unnecessary].” The result: hospital costs are actually higher in areas where there is more competition for patients.



Human Nature

Responses:1. Competition isn't human nature (cards)2. Talking about excellence, not what's most natural.3. Human nature isn't necessarily good.4. Human nature is self-interest, so we think competition is human nature, but it isn't, and in fact

cooperation would be natural if we realized it was better for us.

Competition is a learned phenomenon

We in the U.S. are taught to compete, but we have to be taught because experience shows that it is learned.


“Sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Bruns agreed, basing their opinion on considerable experience with athletes of all ages:

‘Competition is a learned phenomenon… People are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive. We inherit a potential for a degree of activity, and we all have the instinct to survive. But the will to win comes through training and the influences of one’s family and environment. As the song in South Pacific put it, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.”*

*Tutko & Bruns, Winning is Everything and Other American Myths, p. 53

“In the united states, we are carefully taught, and the result is that excepting the kind of invisible cooperation that is required for any society to run, Americans appear to be uniquely uncooperative as a people. David Riesman, the eminent sociologist, found an interesting irony in ‘the paradoxical belief of Americans that competition is natural — but only if it is constantly re-created by artificial systems of social roles that direct energies into it.’”

Competition is a culturally defined situation

Mead’s research shows that people will compete or cooperate depending upon which their society encourages.


“The most basic conclusion which comes out of this research [is] that competitive and cooperative behavior on the part of individual members of a society is fundamentally conditioned by the total social emphasis of that society, that the goals for which individuals will

Negative Brief Applications: Human Nature


work are culturally determined and are not the response of the organism to an external, culturally undefined situation.”

Margaret Mead, Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, p. 16

Example of the above

Iroquois cooperate both in work and in leisure activities.


“THE IROQUOIS INDIANS — Beyond the degree of cooperation required to achieve the greatest efficiency in production, there was found, especially in agricultural activity, cooperation for the purpose of experiencing the pleasure of group work.”

B.H. Quain, The Iroquois, p. 256

The conclusion of the above three points:

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p.38

“Competition is a matter of social structure rather than human nature. Competition may be an integral part of certain institutions in contemporary Western society, such as capitalism, but it is clearly not an unavoidable consequence of life itself.”

Competitiveness is dependent upon one's culture

Encyclopedia of Psychology , “COMPETITION”, Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd ed. Gale Group, 2001.

Americans uniquely praise competition as natural, inevitable, and desirable. In 1937, the world-renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead published Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, based on her studies of several societies that did not prize competition, and, in fact, seemed at times to place a negative value on it. One such society was the Zuni Indians of Arizona, and they, Mead found, valued cooperation far more than competition. For example, the Zuni held a ritual footrace that anyone could participate in, the winner of which was never publicly acknowledged and, in fact, if one person made a habit of winning the race, that person was prevented from participating in the future. After studying dozens of such cultures, Mead's final conclusion was that competitiveness is a culturally created aspect of human behavior, and that its prevalence in a particular society is relative to how that society values it.

Negative Brief Applications: Human Nature


Natural Selection / Basis for life

Equivocation on compete. Natural selection is not the same as competition. Competition tends to hurt organisms' chances of survival more than it helps.

Natural selection is not a competitive process

Natural selection is about who survives, but there is no inherent reason that my survival always precludes yours.


“In fact, there is no necessary relationship between natural selection and competitive struggle. As Stephen Jay Gould put it recently:

‘The equation of competition with success in natural selection is merely a cultural prejudice… Success defined as leaving more offspring can… be attained by a variety of strategies—including mutualism and symbiosis—that we could call cooperative. There is no a priori preference in the general statement of natural selection for either competitive of cooperative behavior.’

Gould’s point is that there is nothing about evolution that requires competition. And, indeed, Darwin himself made clear that he was using the term ‘struggle for existence’ in a ‘large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being upon another.’”

Nature discourages competition


“Natural selection does not require competition; on the contrary, it discourages it. Survival generally demands that individuals work with rather than against each other — and this includes others of the same species as well as those from different species. If this is true, and if natural selection is the engine of evolution — The central theme of “nature”, as it were — then we should expect to find animals cooperating with each other in great numbers. And so we do.

“It was Petr Kropotkin, in his 1902 book Mutual Aid, who first detailed the ubiquity of cooperation among animals. After reviewing the habits of species ranging from ants to bison, he concluded that:

‘Competition … is limited among animals to exceptional periods… Better conditions are created by the elimination of competition by means of mutual aid and mutual support…”Don’t

Negative Brief Applications: Natural Selection / Basis for life


compete! — Competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine — practice mutual aid!…” That is what Nature teaches us.’*”

*Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, pp. 74-75

Nothing in the doctrine of natural selection requires competition

Encyclopedia of Psychology , “COMPETITION”, Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd ed. Gale Group, 2001.

This doctrine [natural selection], which posits that those species best able to adapt to and master the natural environment in which they live will survive, has suggested to many that the struggle for survival is an inherent human trait which determines a person's success. Darwin's theory has even been summarized as "survival of the fittest"-a phrase Darwin himself never used - further highlighting competition's role in success. As it has often been pointed out, however, there is nothing in the concept of natural selection that suggests that competition is the most successful strategy for "survival of the fittest." Darwin asserted in The Origin of Species that the struggles he was describing should be viewed as metaphors and could easily include dependence and cooperation.

Negative Brief Applications: Natural Selection / Basis for life


Science

“Science would be ruined if, like sports, it were to put competition above everything else” ~Bernoit Mandelbrot (French and American mathematician, best known as the father of fractal geometry)

Competition in science encourages questionable practices.Warren 0. Hagstrom, University of Wisconsin, Madison, COMPETITION IN SCIENCE, American Sociological Review 1974, Vol. 39 (February): 1-18

The argument for the functionality of competition among autonomous scientists is analogous to that about competition in economic markets. Competition in science also may have some of the dysfunctions of competition in economic markets. It may involve unnecessary duplication of effort, as I shall discuss below, and it may inhibit cooperation. The competitive environment clearly places many scientists under stress. Some will tend to use illegitimate means to win priority. In their studies of medical experimentation, Barber and his associates (1973:ch. 4) found that scientists who had been relative failures in their competition with others but who still strived to achieve success were more likely than others to undertake ethically questionable research with human subjects. Other scientists will be tempted to fudge their data to produce acceptable results (see e.g., Westfall, 1973), but the public nature of science probably inhibits such practices (Hagstrom, 1965:85). On the other hand, cases are well known where ideas, or even data, are appropriated without acknowledging the original sources. This theft of ideas ranges from outright plagiarism to a scientist's learning of another's research program and then working quickly and covertly to obtain the results first (see discussions in Merton, 1957, 1963, 1965; Hagstrom, 1965:86f; and Gaston, 1971). The failure to recognize the research accomplishments of another scientist in accord with his expectations is the source of priority disputes.

Secretive behaviour in science is has costs which cooperation can solve.{Make obvious point that competition encourages secrecy}Warren 0. Hagstrom, University of Wisconsin, Madison, COMPETITION IN SCIENCE, American Sociological Review 1974, Vol. 39 (February): 1-18

Secretive behavior has both personal and social costs. It tends to isolate the individual scientist. This takes some of the fun out of science and may reduce productivity by inhibiting valuable feedback from others at the early stages of research.5 This personal cost, lower productivity, is also a social cost. Other social costs might include duplication of effort and a diminution of solidarity in the scientific community. Individuals may attempt to avoid these costs by cooperating with their competitors on a "division of the problem"; this may be possible in small specialties.

Negative Brief Applications: Science


Society

Cooperation doesn't require an idyllic state of harmony

Kohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 155-156

To cooperate, as I have tried to show in earlier chapters, is not to sacrifice either an achievement orientation or a strong sense of self. On the contrary, success will more likely be the result of working with other people, and the same might be said for healthy self-esteem. Here I would like to rescue cooperation from yet another misconception: it does not imply some idyllic state of harmony among participants. To the question “But how do you expect people to agree on everything?” we answer, “They don't – and that's why a cooperative framework for dealing with disagreement is so critical.”

Essentially, exchanging ideas is better, and cooperative, while trying to prove a point is destructive, and competitive. - me

Many social activities are based on cooperationKohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 18

“The truth is that the vast majority of human interaction, in our society as well as in all other societies, is not competitive but cooperative interaction.” - Educational psychologist David and Roger Johnson

Cooperation is vital to societyKohn, Alfie, “No Contest: The Case Against Competition,” Revised Edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, New York NY, ISBN 0-395-63125-4 p. 18Anthropologist Ashley Montagu

“Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible.”

Without cooperation, we would have chaos [143]

Steve Kangas [Areas of study include economics, sociology, religion, evolution, game theory, chaos theory, meritocracy theory, environmentalism, women's studies, American and European history, crime, media studies, race, nature vs. nurture and welfare issues. Bachelor of Arts, Russian Studies], "Spectrum Five: Competition vs. Cooperation", © Copyright by Steve Kangas, editor, 2000, http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-spectrumfive.htm

But imagine what it would be like to live in a society where each individual competes against everyone else, without any cooperation at all. You wouldn't dare walk outside, for your neighbor could shoot you and take all your property. Nor could you rely on the police to protect you, since law enforcement is a form of social cooperation. In a perfectly competitive world, only the

Negative Brief Applications: Society


strongest or luckiest would survive.But what if you were fortunate enough to be one of the strongest or luckiest? After killing off most of society, you would only find yourself among survivors who were highly competent killers themselves, and the terror would start anew. And even if you emerged the final victor, the rewards would be slight… how rich and satisfied can you be when you're a hermit?

All species avoid this bleak scenario through cooperation.

Competitors would often be better off cooperating [126]


Hostile cooperation, on the other hand, is what exists between competitors. This may seem paradoxical, yet there is a good reason why competitors often cooperate with each other: the rewards are greater. For example, if everyone fights for a piece of the pie, then the fight may become so costly that the pie will be nearly gone when it comes time to divide it. It's much better to forget the fight and come to an agreement from the very beginning. An example of hostile cooperation is family members who are contesting a million-dollar will. If they fight for the money too hard, then no one will get any, because it will all go to their lawyers' fees. Hence, it's in their interest to strike a deal.

Competition in human society is deadly [61/185]


War is an obvious example of deadly competition within the human species, but most people don't realize that the same continues even during times of "peace." In our competitive economy, those who lack the skills, education, talent or opportunity to compete well become poor. And the poor suffer from death rates that are at least six times higher than the rich. (5) This higher death rate is due to a lack of resources: namely, health care, nutritious food, toxic-free environments, winter heating, information and education, and countless other means and devices that would protect and prolong their lives.

Here, critics may object that the above observation is based on a faulty assumption. We do not live in a zero-sum economy (where someone's gain is necessarily someone else's loss). We actually live in a (slightly) positive-sum economy, where the standard of living is rising for everyone. This is certainly true, but our standard of living grows extremely slowly -- whereas the population pressing against it tries to grow much faster. Therefore it's still quite possible for a positive-sum economy to experience deadly competition for limited resources.



Cooperative society is not as Utopian as it would seem [97]


Critics charge that humans are naturally competitive animals -- after all, they evolved that way. To create a perfectly cooperative society, they charge, is both impossible and utopian. This is certainly true, but fortunately, there is a way around it. Competition for survival is only one of the many thousands of ways that humans compete. Humans also fulfill their desire to compete through games, sports, contests, social status, career status, academic status, even mating. Eliminating the need to compete for survival would hardly eliminate the countless other ways that humans compete. Competition could still be used to improve society, even a sustainable one.

The social contract is one way humans cooperate to survive (Hobbes) [77/105]


Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): Hobbes correctly identified that humans were locked in a deadly competition for limited resources. But he misdescribed the "state of nature" as an anarchic, chaotic, individualistic world where people were engaged in a "war of everyone against everyone." Thus, Hobbes believed life in the state of nature was "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." To resolve this, humans agreed to cooperate for survival, by agreeing to surrender some of their freedom in return for peace and stability. They did this by creating a social contract -- that is, a large group agreement to cooperate and abide by the laws of the government.



Sports

Commonly cited benefits of sports have nothing to do with competition


First, physical fitness obviously does not require competition – or even any rule-governed game. As the recent popularity of aerobics and other noncompetitive approaches to exercise makes clear, one can get a fine workout without a win/lose structure. Second, the camaraderie that results from teamwork is precisely the benefit of cooperative activity, whose very essence is working together for a common goal. Intergroup competition – the creation of a common enemy, a We versus they dynamic – is not necessary for group feeling, as I will show in chapter 6. The distinguishing feature of team competition is that a given player works with and is encourages to feel warmly toward only half of those present, so cooperative activities are twice as desirable if this is our criterion.

Negative Brief Applications: Sports


Subsumption / Balanced Neg

Competition constructive only when cooperative

David W. Johnson & Roger T. Johnson (College of Education, University of Minnesota), “Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research”, 1989

Competition is first and foremost a cooperative activity. Appropriate competition takes place within a context of cooperation. Competitors have to cooperate on the nature of the contest, ow to determine who wins and who loses, the rules governing their behavior during the competition, where the competition occurs, and when it begins and ends. This underlying cooperation foundation to competition keeps the competition in perspective and allows participants to enjoy the competition, win or lose. The stronger the cooperative foundation, the more constructive the competition. When it does not matter who wins and who loses, such as when playing tennis with a friend, the cooperative goal of enjoying each other's company while obtaining exercise dominates. The shared cooperative experience then dominates. Constructive competition thus provides a fun and exciting change of pace within ongoing cooperative relationships to demonstrate mastery of the skills and knowledge required for the cooperative efforts. Intergroup competition is often more constructive than interpersonal competition as teams tend to handle winning and losing more constructively than individuals do.

Competition must be mixed with cooperation for everyone to improve [81]

Coakley, Jay J., Ph.D., Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, “Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies,” fourth edition, 1990, Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing, St. Louis, MO. ISBN 0-8016-0304-8 GV706.5.C63, pp. 77

In summary, uncontrolled competition only produces excellence among an elite few; its effect on the overall level of achievement and participation in the general population is likely to be mixed, but negative consequences are common. Negative consequences take the form of elitism, overspecialization, and the stifling of creativity. To avoid these negative consequences, competition must be controlled and balanced with the cooperative and developmental aspects of the sport experience. Only then will achievements be widely distributed throughout the general population.

Competition is always cooperation

Benjamin R. Tucker, "The Attitude of Anarchism Toward Industrial Combinations", 1899, http://praxeology.net/BT-AIC.htm

"That the right to cooperate is as unquestionable as the right to compete; that the right to compete involves the right to refrain from competition; that co-operation is often a method of competition, and that competition is always, in the larger view, a method of co-operation;"

The purpose of conflict is to reach an agreement. Better to cooperate early than fight.

Negative Brief Applications: Subsumption / Balanced Neg

http://praxeology.net/BT-AIC.htm



There are those who promote combat for the sheer love of fighting or for reasons of personal gain. Such motives can have no place in a moral justification of coercive action. In the light of true social values, the goal of all conflict is not a sullen truce, but an agreement, guaranteed in stability by a willing spirit of agreement. The time to begin this achievement in the spirit of man is in the early stages of the conflict. There is an intimate accommodation between the end and the means employed to secure the end. They must be harmonious. The one must be appropriate to the other. For certain purposes of logic the two words “end” and “means” are placed in apposition, but all phases of a social situation are parts of a single process. The desired goal of a cooperative solution of any conflict can never be achieved until the spirit of cooperation is first achieved in the minds and hearts of the persons involved. If the history of man indicates the difficulty of such an achievement, it also indicates the futility of attempting to produce a state of goodwill by methods that are pregnant with ill-will. It is probably true that certain methods of coercion can be harmonized with the spirit of good-will, but it is by this test that the morality and the efficacy of any social action must be judged.

Negative Brief Applications: Subsumption / Balanced Neg



War

“War’s stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.” - Henry Allingham (last surviving British WWI veteran).

War invigorates the very foundation of violence in society, destroying health, human rights, and the environment, threatening the end of civilization.

Levy and Sidel 2007 (Barry, Adjunct Prof. Community Health @ Tufts U School of Medicine, former medical epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control, and Victor, Prof. Social Medicine @ the Albert Einstein Medical College, epidemiology and biostatistics @ Harvard Medical School, “War and Public Health,” p. ix)

War accounts for more death and disability than many major diseases combined. It destroys families, communities, and sometimes whole cultures. It directs scarce resources away from protection and promotion of health, medical care, and other human services. It destroys the infrastructure that supports health. It limits human rights and contributes to social injustice. It leads many people to think that violence is the only way to resolve conflicts—a mindset that contributes to domestic violence, street crime, and other kinds of violence. And it contributes to the destruction of the environment and overuse of nonrenewable resources. In sum, war threatens much of the fabric of our civilization.

War is the worst impact

Grapel 4 (Jerome, Author, “Why War is Bad?” Because You Never Asked, May) http://www.postcman.info/essay/whywarisbad.htm

As I write this essay, the second Bush Oil War has become the fiasco it always deserved to be. The latest piece of firewood thrown onto the flames of this madness is the graphic international diffusion of the inhuman treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The few days it has taken me to digest and turn this material into some kind of life giving substance has produced the following thoughts: War is bad. War dehumanizes. War is the single most aberration man has ever conceived of. War should only be entered into after the most exhausting efforts are made to avoid it . and even then, don’t we all know that something has gone terribly wrong, that we’ve failed miserably, that we’ve let ourselves down, that the idea of good guys and bad guys, in a real war, becomes less and less relevant until everyone involved is reduced to a brute animal state that should have been exorcized from the human condition long ago? The acts of gross humiliation perpetrated against the Iraqi prisoners seem hardly abnormal when one considers the venue they took place in. War is madness. War is a breathing organism of squizophrenic behavior. The unacceptable becomes routine in such an environment. Everything we’ve ever been told to respect and hold dear is not just ignored, but reversed. Any nation that does not try to avoid war with every fiber of its being, is committing the ultimate act of immorality. Although it generally goes unnoticed or overlooked, there has never been a war anywhere where this kind of bestiality has not taken place. Why all this fuss for the normal behavior of such an abnormal setting?

Negative Brief Applications: War

http://www.postcman.info/essay/whywarisbad.htm

negative brief

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