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Marisa La Piana 's picture

Prisoner's Dillemma

The first round I tried to cooperate, so we tied. Then I tried competing and I beat serendip by 5 points. In an economic sense, cooperation leads to equality but doesn't encourage the improvement of merchandize wheras competition fostoring innovation and improvement but leads to monopolies and an unequal distribution of capital. In a social sense, cooperation can lead to synergy, where both people bet more out of a given situation wheras competition can fostor animosity and lead to severed ties. Personally, cooperation can lead to a win-win situation wheras in competition someone ineviably has to lose. A United States without competition would be completely unsuccessful because entreprenuership and innovation wouldn't exist. If we all cooperated we would have equality, which means we wouldn't have a social hierarchy. Therefore,people would avoid doing the "dirty work" of the society and it would collapse. Competition works because it plays into human nature. History has shown us that a socialistic "cooperative" society only works when it is small scale and everyone is truely dedicated to pitching in for the good of the group. This is difficult to accomplish.

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