LINK: Competition is toxic

Crashes happen periodically in just about everything: commodities, real estate, currencies, equities, bonds, etc. People invest in them because overall return is still expected to be positive.

First, most people buy a house to live in and not as a pure investment. Second, all markets periodically crash (including equity markets promoted on LW as the ideal destination for one's money) and that clearly doesn't stop people from investing in them.

Huge tax benefits in the U.S.

The dimension on which regulations are properly measured is not "high" to "low" but "wise" to "unwise." The US has never had wise banking legislation on the national level (consider Canada as a nation with historically wiser banking regulations). I don't think characterization of the housing market as more highly regulated during the 40s to 90s is correct either, and when it comes to national laws and incentives I expect that 1940 will look wiser than 1990 which will look wiser than 2005.

Were they, really? Do you have some support for that assertion?

Seems like that author started with "competition is evil and responsible for all bad things" as the bottom line, and then just took examples of random problems and tried to fit them to this pattern. As opposed to... exploring things as they are, and then coming to a conclusion.

babies will compete for their mother's attention if she is on the telephone or even just looking away

She uses a wide definition of "competition", probably a synonym of "scarcity". Scarcity is bad, therefore competition is bad, therefore capitalism is bad. In socialism, babies will not have to compete for their mother's attention with a telephone!

I am sarcastic here, but what other purpose does it serve to include the babies in an article supposedly about problems of education, financial crisis, drug research, etc.? If you look into technical details of educational system, technical details of the housing markets, technical details of the pharmaceutical research... I would be surprised if at the end you would find out that all three situations are isomorphic. (And I would be even more surprised if you would find out that the problem is also isomorphic to the babies jealous of the phone.)

This of course leads me to the conclusion that the author does not really care about the technical details of education / housing markets / drug research, and only uses these widely accepted problems as "boo lights" to associate with "competition".

The whole linked interview is just an extended rant on how competition is a horrible evil that corrupts and misfigures everything it touches while cooperation is the way of the angels that leads straight to salvation. I could detect no attempts to think, this is pure attack mode.

Not sure about Lumifer, but I moused over the link, "competition fetish produces human sheep", and elected not to click.

Depends on what exactly they want. If they want to win at all costs, you're correct. But perhaps they want to win at low cost, performance enhancers have a high cost, and cognitive biases prevent them from seeing that.

For more clarification, I was thinking this over when considering rental properties in my area. A lot of people have complained that it is near impossible to make a profit on a rental property where I live. I think a lot of that is because there is a huge chunk of people who have bought property as an investment based on potential appreciation instead of based on cash flow. If your model is using only cash flow, but another model has a 5% appreciation of principle built in to it, it is going to be near impossible to be able to compete with them on rates. However, what you also see is a ton of people looking to sell their rental properties after the appreciation they were expecting never occurs (potentially due to the glut of properties on the market from other people doing the same thing). The people exiting the market take a loss, and the people who could have actually made a profit based on a cash-flow model never can get a renter to begin with, due to overly competitive rates. However, since new people are willing to invest under the same assumptions as the old investors (imperfect information), the market keeps going strong, and renters can take advantage of cheap rates, though no one is really profiting from it. That's the type of scenario you can get with an overly competitive marketplace filled with imperfect actors.

Edit: I'm sure people are making money from rentals in my area, or there wouldn't be so much of it. I'm just also sure that a lot of people are losing a ton of money from it, and driving down prices for everyone else.

No, I'm saying that capitalism is never purely implemented (with no barriers to entry/perfect information/etc.), and there are cases where due to these inefficiencies, increased competition can cause a poor business model to outcompete a sound business model, leaving nobody standing at the end. This doesn't always happen (hence capitalism mostly works).