Fail to stay competitive and you will lose out in ‘the global race’.9And the threat works. Competition and competitiveness have becomeas unquestionable in the modern world as God, His angels and the Devilwere in the medieval. Fear of damnation in the future is ubiquitous. Todaygovernment leaders universally see it as their duty to pursue their nation’sinternational competiveness as unrelentingly as the defence of the realmand far more enthusiastically than regulating business or collecting taxes.But if competition is really so beneficial, why do global problems seemto be getting worse rather than better? If the markets in which we’re allembedded are competitions, and if competition only produces benefits, asneoliberal ideology insists, you’d have thought that its ‘staggering powerto make things better’ would, by now, have caused many of our problemsto disappear.Clearly, something doesn’t quite stack up.