The Mugwumpery

I see today that the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team has won the DARPA Network Challenge, in a little less than 9 hours.

In case you don’t know, the challenge was for a single individual to report the locations of 10 red weather balloons moored, for a few hours yesterday, at random public places around the USA.  The idea was to see if social networks can be used to quickly coordinate the solution of difficult distributed problems.

As has become common, DARPA offered a prize of $40,000 to the winner.  This is a tremendously efficient use of government funds to do research and get challenging projects accomplished – surely it cost DARPA more than the $40k prize money just to deploy the 10 balloons and setup the website about it.  If they’d contracted the problem to a defence research organization, it’d have cost them 50x the amount or more.

The MIT team won by organizing thousands of people to report their observations, with the promise of a cleverly-allocated share of the prize money.

Goal-driven prize competitions just about disappeared for 50 years after World War II.  Prior to that, they were a common and successful way of encouraging challenging achievements – the British longitude prize that led to the development of the chronometer and the Orteig aviation prizes including the one won by Charles Lindbergh for his non-stop transatlantic flight are among the most famous.

Something about the Depression or World War II led to the decline of these prize competitions – I suspect a loss of confidence in the ability of individuals vs. large organizations to accomplish great things had much to do with it.

The Ansari X-Prize – $10M to the builder of a reusable, manned, sub-orbital spacecraft – was organized by Peter Diamandis in the 1990s,  and won by Burt Rutan (with funding from Paul Allen) in 2004.  This seems to have been the turning point for the return of such prizes.

Years ago at a business meeting in France, I said something nice about competition – some truism about how it’s a good thing and should be encouraged.  One of my French hosts mentioned to me later, “you know, in France, we are taught that competition is a bad thing”.  She was entirely serious – to her, competition was the opposite of cooperation (not of monopoly), and could only lead to a cutthroat society of winners preying on losers.

As Eric Drexler likes to say, what most people forget is that almost all competition is about who can cooperate the best.

Economic competition between firms is about who can best cooperate with customers, suppliers, and employees.  Those who cooperate best grow bigger, while the “losers” release people and and resources, making them available to other, more cooperative, organizations.

Perhaps the only significant exception to “competition-is-about-cooperation” is athletic competitions such as the Olympics – which, oddly, enjoy a much more favorable popular opinion than does economic competition.  Somehow people understand that in the field of athletics, there can be no excellence without competition.

But competition is far more important to society in the field of economics – without it, every business would resemble the Department of Motor Vehicles.  (A succinct description of Soviet communism, perhaps.  Or American public schools.)

The renaissance of prize competitions makes me optimistic about the future of American society and culture.  If both private and government organizations can use prizes to spur achievement, and be proud of it, the US may be in the process of getting it’s mojo back.