If you aren't familiar with this libertarian-leaning website, it has several facets worth checking out regardless of your political persuasions. Along with the short articles like my own, the website includes:
- The text of many classical works in political economy, in a searchable format. If I'm trying to track down a quotation from Adam Smith, or John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, or many other writers, it's often my go-to starting point.
- Audio interviews with a wide range of economists, which can be listened to online or downloaded. The most recent is Luis Zingales on costs and benefits of the financial sector, but there are many more.
- The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics with a wide range of short and readable entries written by well-positioned authors.
- The EconLog blog, with Bryan Caplan, David Henderson and Scott Sumner as regular contributors.
Here are the opening paragraphs of my article:
What is the opposite of "competition"? If you fear that this is a trick question and run off to check a synonym/antonym dictionary, you will find an answer that probably came to mind in the first place: "cooperation." Indeed, many people view economics as morally suspect because they perceive economics as emphasizing competition, rather than the arguably more virtuous approach of cooperation.
When I bump into this concern, I often respond that economics seeks to analyze the world as it is, not as we might prefer it to be. We live in an economy in which consumers often seek the best deal; workers commonly seek the job with the best mixture of work conditions and compensation; and firms seek higher profits. If you want to discuss the real-world economy, diagnose problems and suggest solutions, the presence of competition and self-interest among individuals and firms is typically a useful working assumption. The study of economics and public policy would be quite different in a hypothetical world of perfect cooperators.
This response typically works, in the sense that the questioner is more or less satisfied with having received an answer. However, I fear that it concedes too much ground. Specifically, it risks conceding that competition and cooperation are, indeed, opposites, with vice on one side and virtue on the other. But this is a false dichotomy.
And the closing paragraphs:
If both competition and cooperation are understood as voluntary choices (and, after all, "involuntary cooperation" is an oxymoron), then a fully planned economy would be the opposite of both competition and cooperation. When government dictates prices and quantities, a planned economy eliminates the incentives of market participants—whether suppliers, producers, or consumers—either to compete or to cooperate.
Those of us who self-identify as economists should not wear the terminology of "competition" as a badge of shame, while wistfully contemplating a presumed ideal of cooperation. For the study of economics, as in the real-world economy, the concepts and practices of competition and cooperation are inevitably interlocking.
