No Contest: The Case against Competition

TLDR

Competition is often taken for granted, rarely examined, and has received scant scholarly attention over the past fifty years. The author aims to investigate what it truly means to try to beat others, offering a careful analysis rather than a lament or recipe. The study examines the competitive arrangement by analyzing how some must fail for others to succeed.

Abstract

Precisely because we are so immersed in it, competition can easily escape our notice. A fish does not reflect on the nature of water, Walker Percy once remarked, cannot imagine its absence, so he cannot consider its presence. Even those who think and write for a living have paid surprisingly little attention to the subject. In the last fifty years, for example, no one has written a book that explores the very idea of competition and the way it plays itself out in all the varied arenas of human life. I do not mean a lament about what has happened to sports today or a recipe for being a winner in business or a statistical operation performed on abstractions that issue from experimental games. These roll off the presses regularly. I mean a took at what it really means to try to beat other people, a careful investigation of this arrangement that requires some people to fail in order that others can succeed.