The Age of Unprecedented Rivalry
How the 20th Century's Rise in Competition Shapes Our Lives and Careers
Perfect competition never exists in markets, so we play sports. In baseball, football, or soccer, everyone plays on the same field, in the same weather, with the same rules, and given the same information. (Or so we’re told). The perfection of competition gives sports meaning; it allows us to cheer Messi and Brady as the greats of their respective sports and enables the end-of-year trophy to symbolize the status earned from being superior to all others.
And yet, as Bronny James’s all-too-quick journey to the NBA reveals, professional sports seem to be showing signs of nepotism:
Steph Curry and his brother, Seth, are both sons of Dell Curry, a former NBA player1
In the NFL, 12 of the 34 coaches are related to each other or former coaches2
Though I’m unaware of cross-sport measurements, many players appear to benefit from a parent in a different sport. For example, Patrick Mahomes, the incredible NFL quarterback, is the son of an MLB pitcher, Pat Mahomes3
At first scroll, it may sound like sports are becoming less competitive - surely, people are using their connections to get in! - but sports’ precise standards suggest something further. Whatever their fathers did, Steph Curry can shoot a three, and Patrick Mahomes can lead a game-winning drive. Instead, these facts suggest the opposite: sports are becoming more competitive. After all, in a world with very little competition, people could enter virtually any field they liked. But, in a highly competitive world, a little advantage goes a long way. And, having a successful parent in the field is more than a little advantage.
Consider the other end of the spectrum: academics. Relative to the general population, the children of faculty members are 25 times more likely to have a parent with a PhD.4 But, the distribution isn’t even; as the Morgan et al. report:
Parental education is so consequential that it also correlates with where in the academic hierarchy a professor lands. Across all years, we find that nearly a third of faculty at top-ranked universities across all eight fields report that one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and faculty at these elite departments are 57.4% more likely to have a parent who holds a Ph.D. than are faculty at the least prestigious departments (29.8% versus 19.0%; two-tailed test, z = 6.5, n = 2,612 95% CI = 0.076 to 0.142, P < 0.001).5
The point I’m making is not about nepotism, however. It’s about competition. Competition has been rising everywhere for some time, but especially in the US. And it affects many things in subtle, insidious ways. Having a successful parent is just one aspect of this (though, as in the case of Bronny, a very important one!). Below, I go into more detail about how this situation came about before discussing some of the more interesting implications.
The population climbs…
To understand how we got here, let me begin with the world’s population. Our population has been growing rapidly; in an extraordinary fact, it neatly follows a hyperbolic curve.6 As the graph below shows, circa 1900, the world's population was less than a fourth of what it is now and a fifth of what we expect it to be in 75 years.7
This has many implications for the economy, climate, government, etc. But, I want to focus on a more personal and often overlooked domain: Careers. Today, in 2024, there are still 500 Fortune 500 CEOs, as there were in 1955 when Forbes started its now famous list.8 But, today, there are nearly four times as many people in the world. So, doing the math, a person of CEO age (more on that below) has, realistically, one-fourth the chance to be a Fortune 500 CEO in 2024.
The same is true of spots of the Ivy League, a term that goes back to the 1930s to describe eight institutions, seven of which had been founded by the turn of the 19th century.9 Though the number of prestigious institutions has grown slightly (MIT and Stanford, for example), and the size of the schools themselves has grown substantially, the eight Ivy League schools now support a population of nearly 330 million people, when, back in 1800, the entire population of the US was smaller than greater Boston is now. For the average person, getting into an elite school is simply much harder today.
…The field becomes more diverse…
Now, anyone who’s taken a course on US history will want to point out that the admissions playing field was by no means even in 1955, nor was the path to becoming a CEO. This was still the era of WASPS and segregated drinking fountains, an era where lords in manner houses were not an anachronism in the UK, and an age where no one anywhere anticipated meeting a female CEO. All this meant that competition for top jobs was even lower 75 years ago.
But, in fact, competition was even more limited than that. Mid-twentieth century Europe was not the bright spot we think of it being today. Americans often forget how devastating the world wars were and how long it took the rest of the world to recover. London’s population, for example, only reached its pre-WWII peak in 2015.10 While Germany imported millions to support its economic miracle in the 1950s, Russia’s population has never recovered from losing nearly 27 million men in the wars. (Though it’s better than it was; in the late 1950s, Russia had nearly 20 million more women than men).11
Today, Chinese and Indian colleagues are an ubiquitous part of our business community. In fact, two of the world’s leading tech companies, Google and Microsoft, are led by Indian immigrants. But this, too, is a recent phenomenon. In 1955, when the Fortune list came out, there were no rich, technologically cutting-edge Asian countries. Most were trying to stave off starvation. There were, of course, exceptions - Morris Chang, the future leader of TSMC, being an obvious one - but a Harvard MBA in the 1960s was not concerned about keeping up with the Chinese. Looking at the class of 1965 below, they likely only had to worry about each other.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, things differed only slightly. The poverty of Asia and Africa, combined with the destruction of Europe, propelled US manufacturing to soaring heights.12 But, after proving they could run the factories during WWII, women were tossed back into the kitchens once the war ended. Unions, of course, were not equal-opportunity employers, often very explicitly so.13 The result, quite obviously, was very little competition (for white men, at least) inside and outside of the US.
…The burden of knowledge grows…
Competition is driven by more than just the number of competitors, however; competitors’ quality matters enormously! In the context of careers, understanding ‘competition’ means examining workers’ skills, education, and abilities.
Ben Jones, an excellent economist at Northwestern University, has measured this phenomenon in terms of education and coined the term ‘Burden of Knowledge’ to describe his results.14 Simply put, he argues that as science has advanced, the amount of time needed to become an “expert” has grown. When there is nothing beyond calculus, ‘learning mathematics’ just doesn’t take as long! The same is true for physics, history, finance, etc. In other words, competing in a highly-skilled field takes more time today. Consequently, the age of inventors - for example, Nobel Prize winners, has risen.15
While it takes longer to become well-educated today, it’s also true that more education is required to stand out. As the graph below suggests, over the last century, the market has come to expect young people to have a college degree.
…Resulting in more competition
All this means that we must compete far more than ever before. Whether you're interested in getting a Nobel Prize or running a marathon, you simply must do more to stand out. At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, let me make the argument succinctly using (just) three (more) graphs taken across various fields.
First, as the number of applicants in any field grows, getting opportunities in the field becomes harder. Today, social media is increasingly essential to talent spotting. However, with each post on social media, it becomes a little harder to be seen. And, posts are growing exponentially. YouTube, for example, already sees over 2.5 billion videos uploaded each year.16
Second, this necessitates spending more and more effort to achieve the same results as in previous generations. For example, while economists like Schumpeter could become legends for works like Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which contained no mathematical equations at all, by the end of the twentieth century, economists used almost 100 equations per paper, on average. 17
Finally, it’s not just a matter of effort: results matter, too! Over time, competition drives the bar for success higher. To use marathons as an example, winning times in the Boston Marathon fell by 30 minutes for men and nearly 45 minutes for women between 1930 and 2000.18 Being a “good” runner means something different in 2024 than it did in 1924!
Two brief caveats
Before getting to the implications, let me quickly make two quick caveats:
My claim here relates to, but is not the same as Tyler Cowen’s “Average is Over.” He writes of a related phenomenon: fewer people are needed as the world scales, and therefore, there is no average. For example, when the Beatles began their career, there was no good way to play music at a dance without a live band - record systems were simply not that good. So, many “average” bands existed simply because it was the only way to have music at an event. Today, a live band is an ambiance choice because you can stream any song you’ve ever heard and play it through speakers the Beatles could never have imagined.
This furthers competition by creating fewer spots at the top in industries that can be scaled (i.e., those affected by software). By contrast, I’m speaking more generally about things that can’t be scaled by software (e.g., a factory worker), though I don’t disagree with the concept. In fact, it nicely compliments my more general point about competition rising!
I imagine some of you will ask, “But what, really, did we expect?” Indeed, as Ben Jones argues, overtime competition should naturally increase. But, the fascinating thing here is how quickly competition rose in the twentieth century. Rather than being a gradual rise, the population boom, rise of Asia, recovery from the world wars, and traction of social justice movements meant that competition grew suddenly, particularly from an American perspective.
Some implications
The rise of competition has many often overlooked implications. Rather than enumerate them all, let me mention a handful that I think are most intriguing and perhaps more subtle. (I’d love to hear more of your ideas in the comments below, though).
First, differences between generations are real. We often find ourselves comparing our lives to the past, but this is untenable. We cannot compare our economy to a world where Asia was poor, and Europe was bombed out. And we cannot compare our careers to a world where a bachelor’s degree puts you in the top 5% of job applicants. This creates tension between the Boomers, who grew up and established careers during the low-competition era, and subsequent generations, who face a hypercompetitive market.
Second, it takes longer to get to the top, so the people there are older. American readers will likely think of a specific example, but in obedience to my own rules, I will hastily “pivot’ (like a good consultant) to the broader phenomenon. While I mentioned Jones’s work on age above, in relation to Nobel prize winners, the same phenomenon can be observed in other fields. The average age of CEOs at the start of their tenure has risen by nearly ten years (from 45 to 54) over the last quarter of a century, for example.19 Building on the point above, members of the Millennial and Gen Z generations will take longer to get to the top.
Third, the price of success is much higher. A world with more competition simply requires more sacrifice to be successful—you have to do more to outlast the competition. PhD students, who often require 6 to 7 years of training plus a post-doc to begin their path, will know exactly what I mean. However, investment bankers who live on Zyn and Red Bull to work 100 hours a week consistently are struggling with the same phenomenon.
Fourth, the wages are lower. Fields that people do out of love - writing, painting, playing music, etc. - face a deluge of competitors, driving wages down to near zero and, sometimes, below zero. Elle Griffin has an excellent substack post on this in writing, but the same is true in other art forms as well. As supply rises, prices decrease, and the ‘supply’ of people in many fields is very high. Tyler Cowen’s point about average being over makes this even more challenging.
Fifth, credentials become more important. One way to limit competition, discovered by guilds long ago, is to simply develop a credentialing system and lock everyone else out of the profession. This is not good for the profession itself, but it does help those in it.20 Consequently, financial advisors have standardized tests, doctors and nurses fight over who can perform which procedures, and even hair stylists expect the government to police their competitors. While frustrating (and expensive for consumers), as job-seekers, credentials offer a welcome respite.
Sixth, there will be an increased sense of precariousness. The rise of anxiety in the West, particularly in the US, is well-documented but poorly understood - I won’t pretend to clarify the whole debate at the end of this piece. But, I will note that it’s difficult to imagine the rise of competition not contributing to poorer mental health. Being successful requires more things to come together, and the price of failure grows as competition drives down wages at the bottom. This naturally creates a feeling of insecurity that’s difficult to resolve.
As in sports, competition forces competitors to improve their game and sacrifice more to win. While this raises the standard of play and makes it more fun to watch, it also means that the price of getting in is higher, and those with a slight initial advantage can achieve outsized results. While this trade-off will differ for different people, we kid ourselves if we don’t recognize it, along with its implications.
Quah, N. (2022, December 19). Which NBA Sons Would You Want on Your Team? Vulture. https://www.vulture.com/article/sports-nepotism-babies-examples.html
Today, C. B. a. M. F. U. (2022, November 22). Cronyism. Bad hires. Blind Spots. NFL’s Nepotism Has Lasting Impact on Minority Coaches. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2022/11/22/nfl-nepotism-impacts-minority-coaches-hiring-decisions/10673515002/
Frost, I. (2024, February 12). All about Patrick Mahomes' Parents, Pat Mahomes and Randi Martin. People Magazine. https://people.com/sports/all-about-patrick-mahomes-parents/
Morgan, Allison C., Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand, and Aaron Clauset. "Socioeconomic Roots of Academic Faculty." Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 12 (2022): 1625-1633.
Ibid.
I’m grateful to
for mentioning this fact in a previous post. He suggested the below work, which makes this point on pages 7-9:Korotaev, Andreï Vitalievitch. Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends in Africa. Editorial URSS, 2006.
Roser, M., & Ritchie, H. (2024, March 18). Two Centuries of Rapid Global Population Growth Will Come to an End. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth-past-future
FORTUNE 500: 1955 Archive Full List 1-100. (n.d.). https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1955/1.html
Cornell was founded last, in 1865, if you’re looking for trivia questions. See: Timeline - Ivy League. (n.d.). https://web.archive.org/web/20160420101456/http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/history/timeline/index
Taylor, Adam. 2021. “Chart: London’s Population is Finally About to Return to Its 1939 Peak.” Washington Post, December 1, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/01/07/chart-londons-population-is-finally-about-to-return-to-its-1939-peak/.
Sinelschikova, Y. (2024, July 21). How Did The USSR Recover From Losing Almost 27 Million People During WWII? Russia Beyond. https://www.rbth.com/history/330921-how-ussr-recover-war
See Gordon, Robert. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton University Press, 2017.
See: Hill, Herbert. “Labor Unions and the Negro: The Record of Discrimination.” Commentary Magazine, November 3, 2015 [1959]. https://www.commentary.org/articles/herbert-hill/labor-unions-and-the-negrothe-record-of-discrimination/.
Jones, Benjamin F. "The Burden of Knowledge and the “Death of The Renaissance Man”: Is Innovation Getting Harder?." The Review of Economic Studies 76, no. 1 (2009): 283-317.
Jones, Benjamin F. "Age and Great Invention." The Review of Economics and Statistics 92, no. 1 (2010): 1-14.
McGrady, Ryan, Kevin Zheng, Rebecca Curran, Jason Baumgartner, and Ethan Zuckerman. "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube." Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 3 (2023).
Espinosa, Miguel, Carlos Rondon, and Mauricio Romero. "The Use of Mathematics in Economics and Its Effect on a Scholar's Academic Career." (2012).
Miller-Rushing, Abraham J., Richard B. Primack, Nathan Phillips, and Robert K. Kaufmann. "Effects of Warming Temperatures on Winning Times in the Boston Marathon." (2012): e43579.
Statista. “CEOs and CFOs in the U.S. - Average Age at Hire 2005-2018,” July 6, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1097551/average-age-at-hire-of-ceos-and-cfos-in-the-united-states/.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh. The European Guilds. Princeton University Press, 2019.