> co-operate to achieve some common goal.

all systems are competitive, if the system involves humans - after all, even in a constrained environment like academia, where research is cooperative, the competition for recognition is still strong. This includes the order of the authorship presented in the paper.

What you're asking for, regarding cooperation to achieve common goals, is altruism. This does not exist in human nature.

Academia is competitive because it's designed to be competitive. If things like funding, recognition and opportunities go to "winners", people will try to win. It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete. For example you could take away the names from papers and assign funding randomly/semi-randomly and the competition would end. Then add some form of retroactive funding (or other kinds of rewards) that's awarded to research that has produced useful results, and you'll get your incentive to do good research without the need for competition.

It's harder to design systems that avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible. And of course competition is not all bad, it's a good tool when used carefully. But it's way too much when most of our systems are based on it.

Any form of reward leads to competitiveness. In research, it's the funding, and the credit/accolades. In business, it's the money.

Any sort of scheme to try allocate the funding leads to competition for said funding!

In other words, in order to remove all competition in the system, you need unlimited funding. Even randomly allocating funding is insufficient, as it simply means you're competing on luck (for example, by trying to acquire more slots in the lottery).

> harder to avoid competitive behavior, but I don't think it's impossible.

Which i think is not true - it is in fact, impossible, unless you add in the condition that there's unlimited 'resources' (after all, there's competition for resources while it is limited).

> enabling large scale co-operation

This has been proven over and over not to work. Humans are inherently competitive, and so corruption ALWAYS takes over.

Even if you make everything and everyone equal, they eventually get bored and start trying to one-up each other and push the limits of what's allowed, which is just another way to say corruption.

Small government, big government, socialism, communism, capitalism, everything the world has tried has ended in mass corruption.

> It's possible to design systems that do not force people to compete

I have yet to see any real evidence of this working on a societal level.