Monopoly: The Freedom to Be Good

I was driving to Pasadena the other day, stuck in traffic for a full hour. LA traffic is such a mess, but I’ve realized getting mad about it just means I torture myself and still arrive late. So I started listening to Peter Thiel’s Zero to One.

Thiel is known for his belief in "contrarian truths.” He discussed monopolies in chapter 3. Most economists love perfect competition. I remember memorizing its key traits in high school econ class: fierce competition, constant innovation, best products at lowest prices; and interestingly, zero margin of profit. Sounds elegant in theory (1), but falls apart in the real world.

Thiel contrasts restaurants and Google. Restaurants operate in near-perfect competition: low profit, high stress, cutthroat environment. You sometimes see grandmas at the register, kids in the back, staff yelling at each other. When you have to squeeze every penny, kindness becomes secondary to survival.

Now look at Google. For 20 years, its core business (search) has seen no serious competition. Google never had to worry about profit, and that kind of abundance lets you dream. You can offer the best benefits: free meals, medical care, legal assistance, work from home. You can fund moonshots and push the frontier of technology in AI and self-driving cars. Sure, Tesla and OpenAI might move faster, but when Waymo or Gemini arrives, I find Google’s products to have this solid, thoughtful quality that comes from the luxury to do things slow and right.

Economists often view monopolies as villains. But paradoxically, it's precisely this abundance that enables a company — or a person — to be good. (2)

Last week, my friend scratched my car while practicing for her driving test. She immediately offered to pay for the fix, as well as my next maintenance. I was thinking, "Damn, that's nice." Then the deeper thought came: I want my kids to leave that kind of impression on people too, which means I cannot afford to be broke.

I handled it quite well too. I told her not to worry, it’s not her fault at all. But if I were living paycheck to paycheck, stressed about work, with a scratched car on top of all that, I might have "crashed out." Still the same me, but a survival mindset would leave very little space for grace.

I'm writing this because for a long time, I imagined when I end up selling stuff, I'll make my product both great and very affordable (I did not agree with Apple’s price tag of iPhones). I told myself: I should not just chase profit, I am for the people. Looking back, that manifesto was partly out of conscience, partly out of fear of being labeled a “capitalist”. But Thiel’s contrarian view shows that monopolies aren’t evil. When your business is not constantly worried about survival, you can act on your better impulses.

So the path forward would look like this: make monopolist money on one core business, then invest those profits in things you truly believe in. For me, some of these things might include: pushing for a four-day workweek, building third spaces that foster real community, designing tech that helps people reconnect with life, etc. All of these dreams become way more achievable when resources isn't the constraint. So yeah, this blog will also be a reminder for myself that I've got to focus on making the money first to make my dreams achievable.

So in this traffic jam, here's what I concluded: the most valuable thing money buys is the freedom to act with kindness.

(1) my friend has this interesting thought about "economics as religion," where economics has become so ingrained in western politics that it's become unquestionable and merely tries to force everyday life into mathematical models, often distorted. But that shall be the topic of another day

(2) if we extend this argument, the United States in the 20th century was arguably the closest thing to a global monopoly; and that dominance may have driven the fastest technological and civilizational progress in human history.