Competitive Machines
Why Restraint Always Loses to the institutional Rival Who Won’t Hesitate
Core Idea
Human institutions are designed to extract, expand, and compete. When a resource is available and harvesting it confers relative advantage, the institution that hesitates loses ground. The one that exploits wins, at least in the short run.
This happens because institutions are extensions of the competitive drives that built them. Firms, states, industries, universities are all tuned to outperform rivals. Yes, even universities have league tables that they take seriously and try to climb.
The result of competition is predictable. The scrambles and the contests use resources when they can be used, not when they should be used.
The race to the moral bottom happens when institutions optimised for competitive survival treat any exploitable resource as fair game, even when that exploitation erodes the collective future.
Expecting them to voluntarily self-limit at scale is fantasy.
Counterpoint
Somewhere, sometime we latched onto the morally satisfying notion that once societies recognise the limits, once the science is clear and the risks are mapped, rational actors will shift from extraction to stewardship.
Policy will adjust, education will spread, enlightened leadership will emerge.
It is a comforting narrative. It assumes that knowledge translates into action, that institutions respond to long-term signals, and that collective survival outweighs individual advantage.
But, like individuals, institutions do not work that way.
They are not neutral vessels waiting to be filled with better ideas. They are competitive machines that reward actors who exploit openings and punish those who hesitate. A mining company that leaves ore in the ground so future generations might benefit does not become a model corporate citizen; It becomes insolvent. A nation that restrains fossil fuel use while rivals expand does not lead by example; it falls behind on growth, runs ever higher deficits and can’t even afford to import food to feed its citizens.
The UK imports roughly two-fifths of the food it consumes, and the annual import bill for food, feed and drink is about £62 billion a year, equivalent to roughly £950 per person. Meanwhile, the UK is a high-debt advanced economy with public sector net debt at about 96% of GDP at the end of March 2025 and for the year ending March 2025, total public sector net borrowing, effectively the overall deficit, was about 5.3% of GDP. In debt overall and still borrowing to pay the bills.
No problem, we can buy food from our European buddies 😳
But I digress.
The incentive structure is always clear. Short-term extraction beats long-term restraint because extraction compounds advantage now, while restraint merely defers cost.
This is highly rational game theory playing out at institutional scale. The problem is not that institutions lack information. It is that they lack any structural reason to act on it when doing so confers competitive disadvantage. And you can substitute individual for institution in this paragraph and get the same meaning.
Here’s the thing.
You can educate every board, inform every minister, mobilise every citizen, and still watch institutions exploit resources to exhaustion because the alternative is losing position to the institution next door.
Thought Challenge
Map the self-limitation test... Choose a major industry, say agriculture, technology, or finance. Identify one place where that industry could self-limit without losing competitive position. Now examine the historical record. How often has genuine self-limitation happened without external force, regulation, or collapse? Write down the gap between what could happen and what actually does.
Decode a sustainability initiative... Select one corporate or government sustainability programme and separate genuine constraint from reputational theatre. Does this initiative reduce total resource throughput, or does it improve efficiency while maintaining or expanding extraction? Is the goal preservation or optimisation? Track whether the outcome shifts the institution’s competitive position or merely rebrands it.
Design the non-competitive institution… Imagine an organisation explicitly structured around longevity rather than growth. List the incentives, governance structures, and decision rules that would keep it focused on multi-generational resilience. What makes this institution non-competitive in today’s environment? Where does it lose ground to rivals who optimise for short-term advantage? How long does it survive?
These exercises sharpen the sceptical instinct. Instead of trusting narratives about institutional learning and enlightened pivots, you learn to see the structural forces that lock exploitation in place.
Closing Reflection
A mindful sceptic is tempted to dismiss every effort at reform and retreat into fatalism. Knowing that institutions will not self-limit at scale because they were built to compete, and competition rewards extraction until the resource is gone, is a tough one to take. Hopeless even.
But at least the naivety is gone.
Institutions optimised for exploitation do not become institutions of stewardship just because the data is in. They will remain efficient at exploitation until competition no longer matters.
Evidence Support
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.
TL;DR… when many individuals have open access to a shared resource, each has a direct incentive to increase use, while the costs of depletion are spread across the group, producing systematic overuse and eventual collapse. This outcome is not a technical glitch but flows from the underlying incentive structure, meaning that without coercive rules or transformed norms, rational actors will destroy the commons that sustain them.
Relevance to insight… when institutions give individuals competitive advantage for extra extraction and diffuse the costs, exploitation is the logical outcome, not an accident. It shows why simple awareness of limits does not trigger restraint because the actor who self‑limits while others continue to exploit ends up worse off, even if the group as a whole would be better served by restraint. The insight that institutions channel individual competition into collective depletion underpins the claim that our systems are tuned to exploit, not to pivot into stewardship once limits become visible.
Dietz, T., Ostrom, E., & Stern, P. C. (2003). The struggle to govern the commons. Science, 302(5652), 1907–1912.
TL;DR… decades of research on common‑pool resources show that successful governance requires complex, multi‑level institutions with monitoring, graduated sanctions, and mechanisms to align individual incentives with long‑term collective outcomes. Large‑scale, global commons such as climate and oceans are especially vulnerable because existing institutions struggle to create credible, enforceable constraints on exploitation across jurisdictions and power asymmetries.
Relevance to insight… effective self‑limitation is hard work against the grain of default institutional incentives, not a natural evolution once science clarifies the risks. The authors frame governance as an ongoing struggle, not a smooth progression from knowledge to stewardship, which mirrors the insight that institutions do not spontaneously pivot from extraction to longevity at scale. It reinforces the idea that without deliberately engineered constraints and enforcement, institutional competition continues to reward overuse even as the damage becomes obvious.
Ostrom, E., Burger, J., Field, C. B., Norgaard, R. B., & Policansky, D. (1999). Revisiting the commons Local lessons, global challenges. Science, 284(5412), 278–282.
TL;DR… empirical cases where local communities have sometimes managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons by building tailored rules, boundaries, and enforcement that internalise the costs of overuse for resource users. Contrast these local successes with the severe difficulties of governing large‑scale commons such as international fisheries and transboundary water, where existing institutions often fail to restrain exploitation despite clear evidence of degradation.
Relevance to insight… Where institutions are small, cohesive, and explicitly re‑engineered around long‑term survival, self‑limitation is possible, but as scale increases and competition between institutions intensifies, exploitation again becomes the default. That pattern supports the claim that mainstream economic and political institutions are not naturally aligned with longevity, and that expecting large‑scale systems to voluntarily self‑limit misreads the underlying incentive landscape.
Pauly, D., Christensen, V., Guénette, S., Pitcher, T. J., Sumaila, U. R., Walters, C. J., Watson, R., & Zeller, D. (2002). Towards sustainability in world fisheries. Nature, 418(6898), 689–695.
TL;DR… global marine fisheries have followed a pattern of serial depletion, where industrial fleets systematically over exploit high‑value stocks, then move down the food web and across geographies, masking collapse through technological advances and spatial expansion. They demonstrate that current institutional and economic arrangements have produced chronic overcapacity, heavy subsidies, and declining catches, and argue that only deep cuts in fishing effort and protected reserves can restore sustainability.
Relevance to insight… institutions in the real economy respond to competitive pressure by extracting harder and further, even after the ecological bill is obvious. Fisheries governance bodies, national governments, and firms all face strong incentives to maintain or increase effort to protect short‑term revenue and political capital, which means that self‑limitation is structurally punished rather than rewarded. The paper gives operational teeth to the insight that institutions are tuned to exploit any available stock so long as doing so yields relative advantage, even as it erodes the long‑term viability of the system itself.
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E., … Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), 472–475.
TL;DR… the planetary boundary’s framework, identifying biophysical thresholds for processes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen cycling beyond which the Earth system may shift into less hospitable states. Their analysis shows that human institutions and economies have already pushed several boundaries beyond safe limits, indicating that current trajectories reflect persistent overshoot rather than cautious self‑restraint.
Relevance to insight… cumulative outcome of institutional behaviour at planetary scale and finds not a pattern of precaution but one of systematic overreach. The fact that multiple boundaries are transgressed despite decades of scientific warning underscores that knowledge alone does not realign institutions around longevity because political and economic systems remain keyed to growth and competitive performance. It provides a high‑level diagnostic that our dominant institutions have optimised short‑term exploitation of the planetary substrate, and that self‑limitation emerges only under exceptional, deliberately engineered conditions, not as a default response once we “know better”.