Competition is the lifeblood of American society. It is celebrated as a virtue at all levels of our society. It fuels business and determines who succeeds and who does not--those who are able to compete succeed, while those who cannot will fail. We celebrate it in sporting events and teach it as a value to the young from the time they begin school. School itself becomes an arena for competition--students compete with one another for a high position on the infamous "grading curve" which of necessity means that some will fail simply because others succeed. It should come as no surprise that competition is an essential and unavoidable element in our economy and that fostering competition has become a strategy for spurring growth, ending recession, and creating jobs, revenues, and a higher standard of living for everyone.
Politicians talk endlessly of making America more competitive, and the perception is clear that in recent years America allowed itself to become less competitive while certain foreign countries have become more competitive and more successful. Whicker and Moore (1988) express this idea when they state that the U.S. today is at a crossroad, "the issue of developing an economy capable of competing in the new international trade wars" (2). Competition is today much discussed in terms of technology, and improvements in technology are seen as valuable precisely because they enable our economy to be more competitive. Yet, in this area today America is seen as less competitive than it should be. The Japanese are seen as more competitive in the use of robotics, for instance. At the same time, a number of factors are cited as slowing growth in the U.S., factors which can be seen as having an influence on competitiveness, among them the degree of investment in new industrial plant and equipment (lower in the U.S. than in other industrial nations since the 1950s), investment in relevant research and development (in wh...