russell on competitiveness...

 "Why do we, in fact, almost all of us, desire to increase our incomes?

... mainly in order to impress our neighbours"

Bertrand Russell

"Why do we, in fact, almost all of us, desire to increase our incomes? It may seem, at first sight, as though material goods were what we desire. But, in fact, we desire these mainly in order to impress our neighbours. When a man moves into a larger house in a more genteel quarter, he reflects that ‘better’ people will call on his wife, and some unprosperous cronies of former days can be dropped. In every big city, whether of Europe or of America, houses in some districts are more expensive than equally good houses in other districts, merely because they are more fashionable. One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected. As things stand, admiration and respect are given to the man who seems to be rich. This is the chief reason why people wish to be rich. The actual goods purchased by their money play quite a secondary part.

Take, for example, a millionaire who cannot tell one painting from another, but has acquired a gallery of old masters by the help of experts. The pleasure he derives from his pictures is the thought that others know how much they have cost. All this might be different, and has been different in many societies. In aristocratic epochs, such as Ancient Rome or Sparta men were admired for their birth into the military caste. In some circles in Paris, men are admired for their artistic or literary excellence, strange as it may seem to some Americans. In a German university, a man may actually be admired for his learning in physics or chemistry. In India saints are admired; in China, sages. The study of these differing societies shows the correctness of our analysis, for in all of them we find a large percentage of men who are indifferent to money so long as they have enough to keep alive on, but are keenly desirous of the merits by which, in their environment, respect is to be won.

The importance of these facts lies in this, that the modern desire for wealth is not inherent in human nature, and could be destroyed by different social institutions. If, by law, we all had exactly the same income, we should have to seek some other way of being superior to our neighbours, and most of our present craving for material possessions would cease. Moreover, since this craving is in the nature of a competition, it only brings happiness when we outdistance a rival, to whom it brings correlative pain. A general increase of wealth gives no competitive advantage, and therefore brings no competitive happiness. There is, of course, some pleasure derived from the enjoyment of goods purchased, but, as we have seen, this is a very small part of what makes us desire wealth. And in so far as our desire is competitive, no increase of human happiness as a whole comes from increase of wealth, whether general or particular."

— Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1938), Essay XI: Machines and Emotions, p. 66-7

Image: Bertrand Russell 1937. Born in 1872 into the British aristocracy and educated at Cambridge University, Russell gave away much of his inherited wealth. However, in 1931 he inherited and kept his families earldom (Russell once joked that his title was primarily used for the purpose of securing New York City hotel rooms). His multifaceted career centered on work as a philosophy professor, writer, and public lecturer, even so Russell was not stable financially until the publication of A History of Western Philosophy (1945). This work became a best-seller, and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life. Along with his friend Albert Einstein, Russell had by the late 1940's reached world wide celebrity status as a public intellectual. In 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit, and the following year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature