I was tempted to title this post "competition vs. cooperation," because it is all too easy to think in terms of opposition and division, but that would have run counter to my point - that competition simply cannot explain everything. Competition is the central focus of our society: we idolize athletes who compete at the highest levels, we push our children into competitive sports at earlier and earlier ages, we educate our students to succeed in a competitive market economy, and we praise the "free" market for maximizing competition. It is as if competition, in and of itself, is an intrinsic virtue that can solve all problems. In fact, Mitt Romney has recently been praising privatization in higher education, a venture with dubious results, as this article points out:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/06/when-privatization-doesnt-work.html. But this blog post is not really about the private-public divide, but more about our mindset and understanding of how the world works.
If all your life has been spent in competitive ventures, it is very difficult to extricate yourself from those mental confines. All of your life has been reduced to a mad dash to the top, where your social relations are divvied into winners and losers, your accomplishments have been tallied as victories and defeats, and each success is merely the launching pad for your next battle. This is essentially the model of the world that we are teaching our children. It is reflected in every level of our society, and is fundamentally undemocratic, un-American, and oppressive. Consider the so-called solutions to our broken education system over the last decade: Bush proposed a "No Child Left Behind Act," which had the brilliant idea of penalizing struggling schools and rewarding successful schools. Thus, kids are driven to succeed on standardized tests, even at the expense of their own education, in order to procure funding for their school district. Kids are being taught every day that the only reason they are learning their material is to pass some stupid test that some bureaucrats decided would measure how "smart" they are. This "solution" has been excoriated in the literature on educational methodology, due to the increased emphasis on measurement and the lack of emphasis on real learning, cooperation, growth, or education. As long as we redefine academic success to meet some sort of metric, we can fool ourselves into believing that our educational system isn't broken. But it is.
Worse yet, what does President Obama do with his educational reform? He essentially doubles down on Bush's policy, extending the benefits for succeeding school and worsening the penalties for those who are struggling. We have a fractal pattern of competition in education, and it doesn't work on any level. In each classroom, students fight to be the top of the class, to get that A+, to be the teacher's pet, because that is all they are ever taught to do. Within a school, teacher's are being assessed on the abilities of their students; hence, teachers are encouraged to teach to the test, to cheat, to do whatever it takes to make their students appear the best. They are not incentivized to teach the best, just to appear the best. Among schools, principals fight for ratings and designations of success, because they know that is where the money comes from. The districts compete for fewer and fewer state resources, and the states are so strapped for cash that they all come crawling to the federal government. The federal government's solution is to exacerbate the causes and worsen the problem at every level. Teaching competition as the only mode of thought encourages superficial learning, rote memorization, teacher appeasement, cheating and dishonesty. One only needs to look at the rampant cheating scandals that have surfaced in Chicago, Boston, LA, NY, and other major metropolises to see the effects of merit-based education. It simply does not work.
This is the same model that Mitt Romney is praising in higher education. It is dangerous, it does not work, and it simply robs our students of the very thing they believe they are receiving: an education.
It is not only in education that competition is a dangerous paradigm; its effects are much more pervasive than that. In prisons and in health care, competition leads to a denial of service, rather than improved service. It is a more profitable, therefore a more competitive, business model to provide the least service at the lowest cost to the most people possible. This business model may provide the best results to the most people in certain industries, like manufacturing or technology, but surely one can see how it would fail in prisons or in health care. The health care firm that denies coverage to an individual is improving their competitiveness, but at what cost? While the health care company is avoiding a loss in their pocketbook, they are prolonging or worsening real pain and suffering for an individual. This is literally sickening. The most competitive health package is one that provides the illusion of grandeur, but drops the client at the first sign of an expensive health condition. Turning now to prisons, I cannot see how it is a good idea to turn over the incarceration system to private incentives and private hands. Doing so represents a complete disavowal of our duties to our citizenry, prisoner or free. Cost-cutting procedures in a private incarceration facility do not keep public safety at the forefront of thought, but focus on the bottom line. To compensate, prisoners are held in more vicious and restrictive conditions, which seems to me to be a clear infringement upon their constitutional rights. The state should be the steward of all of its citizens, whether or not they have committed a criminal infraction. The idea that a person should make a profit off of another's incarceration is base and immoral. It is akin to slavery: the more people that are not free, the more profitable a business for the prison owner. This is disgusting.
Yet many still persist in their idolatry of competition, despite of all the "collateral" damage. I recently watched an interview Jon Steward did with Edward Conard, who was infuriating if only for his obstinacy. The premise of Conard's argument is that America must provide incentives for innovation, and that competitive free market incentives are the only method for doing so. Despite many arguments to the contrary, he persisted in his view that financial incentives are the only effective incentive for engendering innovation. His myopic view of the world is formed by a life spent in the financial sector - where all is profit and loss, winners and losers, boom and bust. The problem with a competition-based economy is that there are exponentially more losers than winners, by the very nature of the game. He claims that innovation and the improved commodities we now over-produce outweigh the massive human loss of the market economy. I disagree. I do not see how an I-pod is worth the life of a worker in China, or how my Nike basketball shoes are worth hundreds of times the wages factory workers receive in the Philippines. I reject the idea that having Microsoft and Boeing as successful American corporations is worth the millions of Americans who are out of work, underemployed, hungry, unhappy, and struggling. The despair of millions is not outweighed by the trendy baubles we grow so attached to.
Competition spurs alienation, isolation, anxiety, and causes a host of extraneous problems that are often forgotten about in conventional economic analysis. Competition is great at creating vast holdings of wealth that are kept in a small circle of plutocrats and oligarchs. This translates to economic data that shouldn't be read as representative of national prosperity, such as GDP growth or stock prices. The reality is this: I don't give a shit if GDP grows by one half or one percent, and I don't care if the NASDAQ falls another 100 points. What matters to me, and to the vast majority of Americans outside of the investment class, is how the economy serves me locally. Are there enough teachers employed in our schools? Are there enough police officers on the streets? Are there enough fire fighters and emergency workers? Are our hospitals amply employed? Do we have infrastructure growth and development? Can I find a job without sacrificing my ethics or individuality? None of these questions can be answered by looking at the health of the national economy. It is simply because of the myopic view of the top as the best: and the financial sector, being the focus of our economy, is frequently misconstrued as the most important. The financial sector is the pinnacle of competitive energy, and is also the source of the most waste and human damage. Competition must not be taught as a paradigm, nor held up as some sort of economic fix-all. It is only through concerted effort - which can only be accomplished together - that America can overcome this crisis. We must ask ourselves if the system we live in is representative of the values we claim to uphold. In my view, it clearly falls short.
No comments:
Post a Comment