INVISIBLE COMPETITION.

I just came across Tyler Cowen's Wilson Center essay on invisible competition, and it's interesting stuff:

[I]n the real world, romantic competition has radically changed. Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is the apt title of Sean Thomas’s 2006 book about Internet dating, and there really are, just as millions of men are now potential matches for each woman. But the sad truth for members of both sexes is that millions of rivals are also waiting, waiting to undercut their chances and crush their hopes before they even get close to a first date. All they will “see” is that their charming e-mail to “prettyblonde47” or “bronc0451” was never answered. The competition now is invisible, the rivals ­faceless.What’s true in the romantic sphere is also increasingly the case in the wider world. Most of the pressure on the wages and job security of American software programmers now comes from eager workers in India and Bangladesh. Hardly anyone saw this challenge coming. When those Bangladeshis were learning programming skills and clever ways to sell their services over the Internet, they never issued a challenge or threw down a gauntlet. And it is not just programmers, factory workers, and call center employees who face new challengers....Competition is fiercer than ever before, yet it is also harder to perceive as real. No rival with snarling teeth knocks on your ­door.Any good horror-movie director knows that invisibility increases anxiety. We all want to turn on the light, identify the assailant, or understand the problem we are facing.

There's a lot of truth in what Tyler says. But I'd object to the idea that its mainly the invisibility of this competition that unsettles. Rather, it's all that we do understand about it, which is to say, it's not what we don't know, but what we know. And what we know is that we're now competing against such a broad range of folks that there's very little competing to actually be done. All we can really do is hope that our talents are the ones that will be chosen.A software engineer sensing competition from Bangladeshis knows a couple salient facts: He knows they will work for a tenth what he will. He knows they will work longer hours than he will, and demand fewer rights, and less time with their families. He knows, on some level, that this isn't a competition at all, that it's a choice, and it will not be made by him. Either his boss will choose to outsource his work to a cheaper foreign laborer, or he won't. Within this decision exist many variables, ranging from the cost of communication to the language barrier, but the characteristics of the employee are really not the issue. Assuming basic competency at a job that can be outsourced, there is no worker good enough to outwork the eight Bangladeshis willing to occupy the position for the same price. And the native worker knows that.What distinguishes this competition from other types of competition is not, then, its invisibility, but its diversity. You are competing with so many more people, who vary so wildly from you, that success feels more like luck than anything you can work towards. In Tyler's online dating example, success is, presumably, getting the e-mail in quickly enough, but beyond that, who knows? Used to be that you competed with folks of approximately your class and world. By being the best in your sphere -- a best that had definable characteristics, and that could thus be worked towards -- you could win the competition. Now you're competing with everyone, and all of their talents, and you have no idea which ones are relevant, and which you need to match, and which don't matter, and which you even know about. It's not that you can't compete with what you can't see, but that you can't compete with what you don't know, with what's too far outside your sphere of experience. And that's what unsettled. As Carmine Falcone said in Batman Beyond, "This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don’t understand."