How ‘competitiveness’ became one of the great unquestioned virtues of contemporary culture

Widening economic inequality is the academic topic du jour, but the trend of growing wealth and income disparity has been underway for several decades. How did mounting inequality succeed in proving culturally and politically attractive for as long as it did? Will Davies writes that rather than speak in terms of generating more inequality, policy-makers have always favoured another term, which effectively comes to the same thing: competitiveness. In this article, and in a new book, he attempts to understand the ways in which political authority has been reconfigured in terms of the promotion of competitivenes