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Comment by aninhumer | Hacker News Reader

You say the Manhattan and Apollo projects are the result of "competition", but I think, on an organisational level, they are the exact opposite. They are the result of the US abandoning market competition, and having the state give resources to a group of motivated people working towards a common goal.

>These examples are on a governmental scale, but the same thing happens in industries where startups are fighting to compete against entrenched competitors.

And if they win, they become the new entrenched competitors and abuse their market position just the same, because that's exactly what they were "competing" for in the first place.

>Innovation, technological advancement, and a higher standard of living for all spring forth from competition and necessity.

I think the best way to drive technological advancement and standards of living would be an economic system that actually values those things directly.

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> but I think, on an organisational level, they are the exact opposite

No contradiction there, the competition comes from the other country. It's the same in companies competing domestically too. Within the company, resources are shared and divided in a top-down approach, everyone working to a common goal, using the company's funds to do so. Externally, companies compete with other companies.

I once heard the saying that companies are communistic internally and capitalistic externally.

This pattern seems to stem or be consistent with how humans cooperate and compete, according to Realistic Conflict Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realistic_conflict_theory

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That said, companies competing have overall done a lot less harm than nations competing. At least companies can't declare war on each other, collect taxes, or execute/incarcerate people.

>Within the company, resources are shared and divided in a top-down approach, everyone working to a common goal, using the company's funds to do so.

That's what they try to achieve, but they fail to do so, because the labour relationships are still fundamentally transactional.

Workers aren't working for the common goals of the company, they're working for their salary. And since the primary goal of the company is profit, they are fundamentally in conflict with the goals of the company.

The goal of the employee is thus to seem valuable, and get promotions. Sometimes that means working harder, but often it means making sub-optimal decisions for their own benefit. This isn't always conscious or intentional, but nonetheless, it's what people end up doing, and it leads to a lot of inefficiency: Workers not mentioning difficulties for fear of looking incompetent. Managers insisting on impossible deadlines and so on.

Competition pushes systems to be more efficient, but the problem is it never stops pushing.

Here's a famous example of internal competition turning out disastrously:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inte...

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