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本帖最后由 WindyHuang 于 2009-8-13 10:12 编辑
2."Competition is ultimately more beneficial than detrimental to society."
The quotation is certainly correct, insofar as it describes at least the sifnificance of competition to society. In other words, I do agree with the proposition, subject to the proviso that the benefit of competition can only be fulfilled to the maximum with proper regulations and the guidance of the correct attitute.
To begin with, society is composed by individuals, and competition is the essential driving force of each individual to survive, to improve oneself and ultimately to be excellent and successful. According to the evolutionary theory, the inter-species and intra-species competition are the driving force of adaptation, and finaly evolution. Likewise, competition among human beings can also sitimulate individuals to study, work, and fight hard in order to accustom to circumstances, to develop, and to win. This kind of individual competition is well advocated by the famous Olympic spirit: faster, higher, stronger. Further more, our society or authorities often exploit competition to build mechanisms so as to select social elite. For example, China’s college entrance exam is a
sort of tipical highly orgnized competition as an efficient and effective method for the huge country to decide who are qualified to receive a higher education, since only a limited number of students are able to get into colleges because of finite resouces, say 60 percent of the exam participants according to the data from the Ministry of Education.
Turning from the individual aspect to the social one, society can benefit from competition since it’s constituted by those best-suited competitors and by competition, society tends to be more productive with higer efficiency, to be more comfortable with better living conditions and to be more wealthy with a more profitable market. Just as the classic economic theory of invisible hand demonstrates, people who pursue their own interests meanwhile promote the society as a whole. By competition, the price of products in the market is guided to the optimal level which benefits both the manufaturers and the consumers. However, the sellers would set an unreasonably high price while lower the products’ quality to satisfy their own interests, if there is no competition, thus violating consumers’s interests. For that case, the laws make it illegal for business to monopolize an industry, restrain trade, or fix prices.
Even though competition is so beneficial to society, we can’t just ignore the detrimental effect caused by irregular competition or hypercompetitiveness. With respect to the irregular competition, it will render illegal or immoral actions such as cheating, contract frauds and dumping(倾销). Let’s still take China’s college entrance exam for example. The infamous cheating scandal in the city of Chongqing that 15 officials falsified the ethnicity of 31 students participating in this year’s college entrance exam for the plus 20 scores, ending up with the dismission of the 15 officials and refusal of those 31 students to entry to any university this yeat, has warned us the competition would bring about serious problems and should be preserved by regulations so that every competitor have equal rights. With respect to the hypercompetitiveness, which means the tendancy towards extreme and unhealthy competition, it would twister people phsycologically, making them over aggressive and likely to turn any activity into competition. As a result, those kind of people will feel threatened when they find themselves losing and treat competition and win at any cost as a means of self-worth maintenance.
So, how to make a balance and to achieve the optimal benefit of competition? The answer is that we should set a series of regulations to clarify people’s legal rights in the competition, and offer education and phsycological guidance to protedt people from being hypercompetitive. In addition, I suggest that we should also recognize that there is coorperation besides competition. Knowing how to coorperate with others can ensure us to conduct healthy competition. And only regular and healthy competition can be defined as more beneficial than detrimental to society. |
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