In an interesting post exploring the contemporary relevance of John Rawls' political theory, Mark Braund sums up well a key political problem of our times:
'people’s attitudes & behaviours are shaped by their experience of life, and the institutions through which they engage with others. If those institutions reward competitive behaviour, people will behave more competitively. Imagine what would happen if they rewarded cooperation instead'...
I'm afraid that even in the 'Original Position', some in the US would prefer the possibility of accumulating enormous wealth at the expense of others. Also, the principle of difference doesn't seem to work. These acquisitions of enormous wealth are abviously harming others.
@ChrisMayLA6 That is a great argument for letting the market run our societies and not zero-sum political combatants.
Not sure it is; markets (however configured) do not promote cooperation but rather are configured to prompt competition, and economic actors are almost by definition zero-sum participants in economic interactions.... you might argue (along with Adam Smith that the invisible hand of market relations does result in effective cooperation via the division of labour, but even Smith argued that ended to be carefully regulated)
@ChrisMayLA6 I disagree here. Yes, I might compete with my competitors, but I cooperate closely within my organization, and with my customers. After all, the competition does not consist in any activities where I actively block or "fight" the competition. We compete in providing the customer the best possible service or product.
So based on that, saying that the market promotes competition, is based on the wrong idea of competition. If you look at customer/client relationships you'll see they are based on close cooperation and non-zero sum interactions. The same goes for teams within the same company.
Let me add another scenario as well. Very often, I cooperate with business partners, and other companies to deliver solutions together.
So I do not think competition is the right word to describe whta goes on on the market.
Last, but not least, the market is provably not zero-sum, but generates increasing wealth. The proof is that despite being billions today, globally we've achieved unbelievable standards of living for everyone on the planet.
This shows that the markets are the only positive and wealth generating systems we have, and we have achieved this despite governments and politics, which is truly zero-sum, and does not have the ability to generate wealth.
yes, I agree with some of the latter aspects of markets.... but I also differ (as you'd expect) on how much cooperation markets themselves engender - certainly there is lots of cooperation in the economy, but how much of that is the *result* of market interaction I think is less clear - rather much of that is related to other organisational drives & practices (away from the actual market interface itself)
