Competition and the ecological disaster

“Even if you win the rat race, you still remain a rat.”

Adriano Bulla

At least 90% of our economy is producing goods and services which are only required to stabilize our competitive system and have no real use. Think about the following examples:

  • Money and the financial system (banks, investment funds etc.): money is only needed because we don’t trust each other. If we give somebody a gift, we expect a reciprocal gift of exactly the same value back immediately. Money is the technical invention which makes this possible.
  • Insurances are needed because we don’t help each other if we are in trouble.
  • Pension funds, charity and the social system are needed because we don’t support old or poor people.
  • The whole complex system of the government (alone about 50% of the GDP!) is mostly needed to redistribute money for „fairness“. The school system is required because we don’t have time anymore to teach kids (which could be an exceptionally rewarding activity). The army is a joke anyway. The rest is enforcing millions of rules which make our lives complicated: controlling people and prosecuting/punishing them (police, courts etc.). All this is required only because people always try to get an advantage over others.
  • Many products are produced to satisfy status needs (luxury cars, villas etc.). As we have seen status needs are fundamentally limitless and this is why this production sector is huge.
  • The production of many products could be reduced drastically if we would share them (like cars). Some products would be even much more useful if shared (cars, bicycles).
  • Restaurants and hotels are needed because we don’t invite travelers to our home anymore.
  • The whole security industry (including the fast growing industry of IT security) is only required because people are trying to cheat each other all the time.
  • Marketing, advertising and sales are purely competitive tools. They are used to make people buy things they don’t really need.
  • Software industry: All the code gets written a hundred times in more or less the same way because few developers are willing to share. Therefore the sector is highly inflated because it is so inefficient.
  • Of course all the companies and institutions producing the products and services above need offices, have travel and IT needs, need energy and products etc..

Of course all this economic activity results in a correspondingly high pollution of the environment and an enormous waste of natural resources. It also creates a false impression of resource scarcity: we learned to believe that the available resources on this planet are not sufficient to guarantee a nice life for everybody and that we therefore have to compete for the little available resources. But in reality the resource scarcity is created by the competition!
This means that we could reduce our energy and resource consumption as well as the pollution by about a full order of magnitude (i.e. 10x).

Which products and services are really useful and needed?

Only the following few points come to my mind:

  • Agriculture. We need tasty and healthy food.
  • Housing (mostly for people).
  • Art (all kinds: music, design...) and entertainment. Lots!
  • Health care.
  • Some production of really useful goods (plates, corkscrews and the like).
  • A bit of transportation (trains, bicycles, cars, planes etc.).
  • Some energy, clean water etc. (on a low level which could be produced easily from renewable sources).
  • Communication and computing (like telephone and internet, community maintained social media).

The latest developments show how disastrous the environmental effects of competition can be: we currently waste huge amounts of electrical energy to „mine“ bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are completely useless (they are not even physical) and they are only popular because we don‘t trust each other (money, „smart“ contracts, tokens etc.).