Competition over the eons has produced humankind.  We are the product of natural selection -- the strongest survived while the weak lost out.  But a quantum leap of progress in our evolution was when a few one celled animals found that working together was mutually beneficial.  One human body is the sum of many millions of cells acting in harmony.  Those civilizations over time whose inhabitants have learned to act cohesively are the ones that have tended to last.  So it is the balance of success of the individual and the success of the group that leads to true progress.

Utopia needs competition for many reasons.  In capitalism, competition provides three very necessary benefits: it stimulates people to come up with an astounding variety of new things and ways to do things, it weeds out the less efficient companies in the business of established things, and it closes businesses in old technologies as new technologies come along.  In society, competition tends to pair the best mates and helps promote the best leaders (though the truly best may not end up the leaders for other reasons).

But the competition has its side effects, too.  People as a general rule are very leery of change.  And those who perceive themselves as having lost out legitimately feel unhappiness, because for every winner there is some person or group that did not win.  Anyone familiar with physics knows that turbulence impedes and streamlined flow achieves much higher throughput.

Utopia will need a way to channel effort more effectively -- with more collaboration and less antagonism .  Rewards for the economic success of any individual can be more social as opposed to remunerative.  For established industries, competition within an industry can be finding a new best way for the whole industry to do something rather than between companies producing in that industry.  Thus it becomes much easier to establish standards that help the industry more fully blossom.  Consider how the electronic keyboard industry accelerated in the 1980s when all the companies adopted a universal standard language -- MIDI -- with which to talk among themselves.  Another example happening right now is the maturing of Linux, an operating system (OS) based on UNIX instead of MicroSoft's DOS.

In early 1999 it is still not a user friendly OS, but it is free for anyone who wishes to download and install it.  Its source code is freely published, and its development is something anyone may contribute to.  The original creator, Linus Torvalds, is the person who decides which solution to a given issue, feature or bug is the one that finally gets incorporated into the main version.  But the amazing thing about this OS is that there are many people all over the world who are happily contributing solutions for free because that is the nature in which it was conceived and delivered to the world.  It is true that in a sense there is competition among the many programmers of the world as to whose code will be the ultimate choice.  But they freely give their proposed solutions.

The real place for economic competition is among the various new ideas that can be developed more effectively because there would be more resources available for them as fewer people are needed to run the established industries.  It is easy to nay say, supposing that something won't work or be well received.  However, suppose everyone looked at all they encountered with an eye as to what might make it better and they could post those ideas where everyone could mull over them.  Surely, we would know good ideas when we saw them.  If everyone were trying to make the good ideas better before even starting a business, the business would be much better refined by the time of launch. In addition, because nascent industry would be publicly known, people could start registering their readiness to purchase the product beforehand so the appropriate scale for the business could also be figured out.