Too much competition, good or bad for society? Is there a win-win?

The case of a high school girl who was disappointed with her performance after the 2023 SATs and made an extreme choice shows the negative effects of excessive competition. Competition can sometimes be beneficial, but excessive competition in Korean society is causing serious problems. Instead of endless competition, we need win-win development.

 

In November 2023, a high school girl took the College Entrance Examination Program (SAT) in South Korea. A student who had always been at the top of her class took her own life because her SAT scores didn’t meet her expectations. Students who make such extreme choices before they even take their first steps into the world of work are often only mentioned in passing and not given much attention. But is this normal? Isn’t this a side effect of too much competition?
The word “survival of the fittest” is a good way to justify competition, as it means that only those who are adapted to a given environment will survive. It’s an important theory that underpins the evolution of life, so there’s no doubt that competition plays an important role in organisms. However, in the current world, competition is often excessive, beyond what’s normal, and it has many negative side effects. We’ve already seen abnormally high suicide rates among young people at the age when they’re just beginning to realize their dreams, and we’re seeing more and more cases of family breadwinners making extreme choices, such as retiring from the workforce. It is said that a moderate amount of tension and stress in life is beneficial, but the tension and stress caused by excessive competition, especially in Korea, seems to be far from ‘moderate’.
To understand this, consider the most common example of competition: running. If a runner who was running in second place was motivated by seeing someone ahead of him and was able to perform better, he would say that competition has clearly led to better results and that competition can be efficient. However, this is only true if both players stay out of each other’s way and focus on their own work. When athletes start trying to stop their opponents, it becomes excessive competition. In fact, there’s a running analogy for this phenomenon. It’s called the Ellenbogengesellschaft. It means “elbow society” in German, and it’s a sarcastic reference to someone who elbows someone who tries to run next to them in a marathon. If a person can disguise a cheating behavior with an exquisite running form, people watching the race won’t know that the person is cheating. It would be easy for that person to win first place, and if they did, they would be applauded and cheered for playing fair. When we apply this to society, we have people who will do whatever it takes to succeed, disregarding fairness and morality, and rationalizing it in the name of competition.
This isn’t the only side effect of excessive competition. When a market is formed for an item, the market is initially small enough that competition among sellers drives goodwill, such as improving quality. For consumers, this is ideal. However, as more and more sellers enter the market, the competition becomes too intense, and eventually they are forced to make extreme choices, such as lowering their prices abnormally, resulting in cheap products with poor quality. This over-competitive market is known as a “red ocean”.
Despite these reasons, we have no choice but to compete and encourage competition. This is because we are under a capitalist system. Capitalism is a social and economic system in which capitalists, who own the means of production as capital, are guaranteed production activities to earn profits. In this economic system, those who lose the competition are eliminated, so competition is inevitable, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. However, is the true victory of this system to surpass others and survive?
The answer to this question can be found in economics. If you’ve studied economics, you’ve probably heard of the production possibilities curve (PPF). This is a graphical representation of the quantity of a good that can be produced in a given amount of time. In other words, given two goods, the graph will start at the point where all of one good is produced and end at the point where all of the other good is produced. If A’s graph is always above B’s graph, then A can always produce more of one good than B can. Therefore, in this production competition, A is the winner. However, this is only true if there is no trade at all. What if A and B each specialize in one good and trade? You might think that A would lose out, but the truth is that both A and B would have more goods to consume after trade than they would have without trade. This is what we should be striving for: a win-win situation where someone in an advantageous position is better off than someone in a disadvantaged position. Isn’t this what we should be striving for: a society where people benefit from each other through moderate competition, rather than the endless competition represented by the elbow society? It may sound like a dream, but I sincerely hope that it’s not too much to hope for in a society that has lost its sense of reason.