Unit8Acompetition and cooperation_脐血and细胞not干细胞

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Competition and cooperation

Drs.Boudreaux and Macaulay are faculty members at Clemson University.Free-market competition is often described as “cutthroat” and “wasteful.” “Dog-eat-dog” rivalries are fueled by “greedy self-interests” operating according to “the law of the jungle” in which “survival of the fittest” is the only rule.In contrast, government regulation is said to have the potential to promote genuine cooperation in which citizens “pull together” to advance the common good.On the rhetorical battlefield, “competition” is too often out-gunned by “cooperation.”

But those who deplore free-market competition simply do not understand it.Competitive markets excel at promoting cooperation.Indeed, to succeed in the market requires great cooperative skills.Adam Smith described how a person buying a wool coat gains his comfort as a result of the willing cooperative efforts of many workers in widely varied activities—from raising sheep to spinning yarn to retailing.Every wool coat requires that very large numbers of people coordinate their

efforts—cooperate—in production and distribution.Perhaps more famously, Leonard Read told of the pencil—an apparently simple device whose existence would be impoible without the cooperation of countle people and firms from around the globe.Still, private firms selling coats and pencils are described as competitive, not as cooperative.And so they are in a genuine sense.Each firm, each producer, competes for the advantage of satisfying consumer demands.But these firms are no le cooperative.A mistake made by those who condemn competitive capitalism is to aume that competition and cooperation are two alternative means of achieving some end.Alternatives they are not.Competition and cooperation are not only complementary human relationships—each is an

unavoidable reality of human society.A mark of a peaceful and prosperous society is that both competition and cooperation are channeled into their appropriate realms.The Principal Realm of Each Activity

A symphony orchestra is an unequaled example of cooperation, yet competition has a role to play even in orchestras.Different musicians compete for each seat in the orchestra, just as different conductors compete to be maestro.Moreover, different orchestras compete for the privilege of making recordings with

prestigious recording studios.Football and baseball teams parallel orchestras in these respects: different players compete for slots on the team, and different teams compete against each other for the championship.And although le obvious, the production of steel, the operation of a department store, and the publication of a magazine all involve both cooperation and competition.Competition and cooperation are unavoidable in human society.Competition is inseparable from scarcity.Scarcity exists when there is not enough of some good to provide consumers with all they would take if it were free.It follows that we must find some way to decide who gets how much of any scarce good.The accepted way in a free society is to allow those who want a particular good—say, a bushel of apples—to bid for it.The bushel of apples will then go to the person who voluntarily sacrifices the greatest quantity of other goods in exchange for the apples.We call such bidding competition, but note that such competition differs fundamentally from another kind of “competition” that could be used to allocate the apples—physical terror: he gets the apples who beats up all others who want the apples.Capitalism’s critics insist that there is a cooperative way to allocate resources.People can meet together and agree who gets what.Early American colonists in Jamestown and Plymouth initially tried to avoid all competition and allocated resources exclusively by cooperative, collective decision.The result was

starvation.When each settler realized that his food entitlement was independent of the amount of work he put in, too many settlers chose not to cooperate in the community’s productive efforts.In both colonies, the specter of starvation forced the abandonment of these collectivist plans, and output then expanded.[]Similarly, the Marxist plan for distribution is a wonderfully cooperative, and detrimental, scheme.If needs are the basis upon which goods are allocated, it will pay each person to produce not goods but “needs.” It will pay people to move toward poverty, for only then will one’s needs be maximized.Moreover, if others do not readily recognize these “needs,” it will pay those in “need” to exert efforts emphasizing the genuinene of their “needs.” Such cooperation on this score would produce not only universal

poverty—society would be awash in nothing but “needs”—but also hostility among those who do not

receive what they believe to be their due.Such an outcome is hardly a happy consequence for a cooperative society.Cooperation is appropriate, of course, when the coordinated efforts and knowledge of many people are neceary to produce a good—such as Adam Smith’s wool coat or Leonard Read’s pencil.People who

competed for jobs now find themselves cooperating with others to produce a product.This cooperation takes place not only among fellow employees but among firms with their customers, stockholders, creditors, and with all manner of suppliers.Sellers cooperate with buyers so that buyers will become repeat customers.Employers cooperate with workers to improve worker productivity.Customers cooperate with suppliers to ensure reliable service and quality supplies.Cooperation is indeed a hallmark of all economic activity in a competitive market.Socialists and so-called “communitarians” may believe that their systems are free of competition and marked only by cooperation.Yet resources are scarce in planned economies no le than in capitalist

economies.At some level, competition will emerge to allocate these scarce resources.In planned economics, people will compete to occupy positions of power.These power struggles, though perhaps hidden from sight, are undeniably competitive.With more power concentrated among the decision makers, losers may give up more than mere goods.When Stalin decided how to allocate Crimean grain in the early 1930s, approximately two million kulaks lost their wheat and their lives.The Good and the Bad

Not all varieties of competition are beneficial, just as not all varieties of cooperation are desirable.Labor unions are made up of cooperating workers.To the extent that unions secure special-interest legislation, the wages of workers cooperating in a union are raised at the expense of consumers and of non-unionized workers.Similarly, businees often cooperate through trade aociations that lobby effectively for import restrictions.Such cooperation yields benefits for the few at the greater expense of the many.Popular phrases describing competition were cited at the beginning of this eay.All such phrases are pejorative.And indeed, competition can be bad.If the owners of General Motors spread nails on the roads leading to Ford factories and dealerships, this is a form of noneconomic competition—and a most undesirable form.General Motors benefits not only at the expense of Ford, but also at the expense of

consumers because the nails on the road effectively eliminate consumers’ option of buying Fords.But notice that identically undesirable consequences occur when General Motors and Ford cooperate with each other to lobby succefully for import restrictions on foreign automobiles.Tariffs hurt consumers no le than do nails on the road.Genuine cutthroat competition occurs whenever firms succefully lobby government for artificial “advantages” such as tariffs or regulations that unnecearily burden rivals: consumers and

foreign-producers are harmed by government pandering to interest groups.Few people, however, refer to

tariffs, dumping laws, and costly regulations as examples of cutthroat competition or busine cooperation.Instead, such legislation is typically revered as desirable social policy.The phrases “dog-eat-dog” and “survival of the fittest” are harsh-sounding phrases, and they vastly misrepresent competitive activity within private-property markets.In competitive markets, firms do not attack each other claw and fang.Rather, firms do battle by seeing who can best serve the customer.That is, in competitive markets, firms compete by seeing who can best cooperate with consumers.K-Mart and Wal-Mart strive to offer consumers better deals because each firm knows that if it fails to offer good deals, customers will patronize other, more responsive firms.Both firms survive as long as each cooperates with consumers effectively enough to earn profits.To protect firms from the competition of rival firms would be to encourage protected firms to be le cooperative with consumers.Of course, in any competitive industry only the fittest firms do survive.In the 1930s, groceries were

distributed mainly by mom-and-pop stores.Today, supermarkets—each of which carries on average about 50,000 different kinds of products—have replaced the mom-and-pops.Supermarkets did not prey on

mom-and-pop stores as cheetahs prey on gazelles.Supermarkets offered consumers a new shopping choice.Consumers voluntarily switched their patronage from mom-and-pops to supermarkets because, as judged by consumers, supermarkets cooperated better with consumers than did the mom-and-pops.No supermarket literally killed mom or pop.Some of these small-store owners retired while others moved into other lines of work.Today, the descendants of the owners of mom-and-pops are surely better off than they would have been had supermarkets never come along.Conclusion

Competition in the marketplace is competition among cooperators.While the best cooperators in each line of work “win” in the sense of earning greater profits than their rivals, these victors do not literally destroy rivals.Rivals unsucceful in one line of work move into other lines, where they are more likely to enjoy a comparative advantage.Market discipline, in combination with the information conveyed in the form of market prices, ensures that each of us is cooperating with as many other people as poible, in the most effective manner poible.Far from undermining cooperation, the market enhances cooperation.1.See Robert C.Ellickson, “Property in Land,” Yale Law Journal, Vol.102, April 1993, pp.1315-1400