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Background When you look at news reports of any kind, there can be a tendency to take them at face value, accepting what they tell us as the truth. This is usually a grave mistake. News typically moves quickly, with tight deadlines to get information and there is almost always a bias at play. Numbers are an easy way to manipulate the truth--and truth itself can be pretty flexible when it comes to human relationships. The value of the truth can also be flexible depending on your point of view. For example, in the second quarter of 2015, the U.S. dollar is strong--meaning it has a high value against foreign currency. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? If you're a consumer, it's generally a good thing in the short-term. It means items imported to the U.S. cost us less to buy. Go us! If you are a growing business that exports, it's a bad thing because your costs make it difficult to compete with locally produced goods in foreign markets. If you're traveling out of the country, it's good because the dollar goes farther. If you have a business that benefits from foreign tourism, it's bad because visitors have less money and may chose to go to other places where their money gives them more buying power.

find an article (you might try MSN Money or CNN Money or something similar) and then write at least 600 words. how strong the position the article takes is. Questions to consider include: What are the weaknesses to the article? How are numbers used effectively? What's missing? How are the numbers being used to disguise something?

ARTIcle

President Obama slapped a stiff 35% tariff on Chinese tires in 2009 after American companies complained about unfair competition. They said China was flooding America with tires at low prices making it tough for U.S. companies to compete. The tire tariff gradually waned, and finally ended in 2012. The tariff saved 1,200 U.S. tire jobs, which had been in sharp decline. And U.S. tire production rose after a major decline. "Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires," Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union address. But a study from the Peterson Institute of International Economics found that the tariffs cost Americans in many other ways. Americans paid more for tires. Some Chinese-made tires cost as much as 26% more -- rising on average to $39 per tire, from about $31. And U.S. tire makers, facing less competition from China, also raised prices on American-made tires 3.2%. According to Peterson's model, higher prices from the tire tariff cost Americans an extra $1.1 billion, which translated to an estimated 3,731 retail jobs lost. Plus, China fought back by imposing penalties on U.S. shipments of chicken parts. The Peterson study estimates that China's retaliation cost American chicken producers $1 billion in sales. "Tire safeguards did not change Chinese policies in a helpful way, nor did they boost U.S. employment," wrote Gary Hufbauer, a trade expert at Peterson, who authored the report. Indeed, the tariffs didn't bring the tire-making jobs back to previous levels -- a similar trend that's played out for the rest of U.S. manufacturing. But they did help to stem the job losses. In 2008, there were about 60,000 American workers making tires. Now, there are about 55,000. That's better than the low point reached in 2010 but not back to pre-tariff levels. Related: Trump's 35% tariff on companies: Easier said than done An Obama administration official, who requested anonymity, disputed some of the calculations and assumptions in the Peterson study. For instance, the official claimed tire prices did not go up by as much as the study claims. Hufbauer said no one until now had contested any of his analysis in the four years since it was published. He noted that the administration official didn't provide an alternative estimate for price changes. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney criticized Obama for the tariffs in his 2010 book "No Apology." "President Obama's action to defend American tire companies from foreign competition may make good politics by repaying unions for their support of his campaign, but it is decidedly bad for the nation and our workers," Romney said. U.S. tire makers still applaud Obama's tariffs. Morry Taylor, CEO of Titan International, a U.S.-based tire company, is one of them. "He did what he should have done and he should have done more of it," says Taylor, who voted for Trump. His company has plants in Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois (they also have operations in Brazil and Russia). Related: 3 ways Trump can go after China and Mexico Taylor argues that if the tariffs weren't put in place he might not have any business today to speak of. By 2012, Taylor still had 1,800 tire-making workers, about the same amount as before the tariffs. Today, however, his firm only has a little more than 900 workers. His problem today is what he describes as unfair competition from India, where firms make cheap tires and sell in the U.S. at prices he can't afford to sell at. He hopes Trump considers higher tariffs on tires, saying it would save jobs. To be clear, Obama wasn't trying to "bring back jobs" so much as protect the ones already in America, which he accomplished. Trump wants to bring manufacturing jobs back from other countries. Some trade experts believe that would be difficult task, since many of jobs overseas are low-skill positions and many U.S. manufacturing firms now want highly skilled employees. In any case, U.S. tire production recovered but didn't surge. Instead, U.S. tire imports from all other countries excluding China rose dramatically, Hufbauer found. In other words, the Chinese tire jobs didn't come to the U.S. -- they went to the next cheapest countries. In the end, Hufbauer argues the tariffs didn't make a difference. "The best thing about the tire tariffs is that they expire," Hufbauer wrote in 2012. CNNMoney (New York) First published January 3, 2017: 3:41 PM ET

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hen finding solutions to this problem. Assessment Directions: For this exercise, choose 10 statements from those given below and write a brief response—two to three sentences—stating your position and explaining at least two reasons why you hold it. 1. Violence is better than reason in dealing with dangerous situations. 2. Only the good die young. 3. It’s human nature to be greedy. 4. Capital punishment is a deterrent to crime. 5. If people are unemployed, they must be lazy. There’s a job for everyone who really wants to work. 6. Everyone has a value system of some kind. 7. We know ourselves better than others know us. 8. An unborn fetus is a human being. 9. If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. 10. Truth is an intensely personal matter: What is true for me is not necessarily true for you. 11. Winning isn’t everything—it’s the only thing. 12. Challenging another’s opinion is a sign of intolerance. 13. Atheists are generally moral people. 14. Censorship is evil. 15. Black people are better athletes than white people. 16. The oil companies manipulate gasoline prices. 17. Getting your feet wet can cause a cold. 18. Homosexuals are as likely to control their sexual urges as are heterosexuals. Please format your responses like this: 1. Original statement 2. My position on that statement 3. Two reasons why I hold this position EN3220: Module 3 Stating and Justifying a Position Exercise 3.1 Stating an Opinion on a Position 2 Submission Requirements:  Submit your responses for grading in a Microsoft Word document.  Adhere to Standard English grammar, spelling, and punctuation requirements.  Use 12-point Arial font and double-space

What does this article suggest to us about how people should go about to truly maximize their level of utility from their limited incomes?

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

It's true to some extent. But chances are you're not getting the most bang for your buck.

New research is suggesting that happiness is determined not by how much money one earns, but rather, how one spends it. University of British Columbia associate professor Elizabeth Dunn explains why. Photo: Getty.
By

Andrew Blackman November 10, 2014

It's an age-old question: Can money buy happiness?

Over the past few years, new research has given us a much deeper understanding of the relationship between what we earn and how we feel. Economists have been scrutinizing the links between income and happiness across nations, and psychologists have probed individuals to find out what really makes us tick when it comes to cash.

The results, at first glance, may seem a bit obvious: Yes, people with higher incomes are, broadly speaking, happier than those who struggle to get by.

But dig a little deeper into the findings, and they get a lot more surprising and a lot more useful.

In short, this latest research suggests, wealth alone doesn't provide any guarantee of a good life. What matters a lot more than a big income is how people spend it. For instance, giving money away makes people a lot happier than lavishing it on themselves. And when they do spend money on themselves, people are a lot happier when they use it for experiences like travel than for material goods.

With that in mind, here's what the latest research says about how people can make smarter use of their dollars and maximize their happiness.

Experiences Are Worth More Than You Think

Ryan Howell was bothered by a conundrum. Numerous studies conducted over the past 10 years have shown that life experiences give us more lasting pleasure than material things, and yet people still often deny themselves experiences and prioritize buying material goods.

So, Prof. Howell, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, decided to look at what's going on. In a study published earlier this year, he found that people think material purchases offer better value for the money because experiences are fleeting, and material goods last longer. So, although they'll occasionally splurge on a big vacation or concert tickets when they're in a more money-conscious mode, they stick to material goods.

But in fact, Prof. Howell found that when people looked back at their purchases, they realized that experiences actually provided better value.

What we find is that there's this huge misinformed forecast, he says. People think that experiences are only going to provide temporary happiness, but they actually provide both more happiness and more lasting value. And yet we still keep on buying material things, he says, because they're tangible and we think we can keep on using them.

Cornell University psychology professor Thomas Gilovich has reached similar conclusions. People often make a rational calculation: I have a limited amount of money, and I can either go there, or I can have this, he says. If I go there, it'll be great, but it'll be done in no time. If I buy this thing, at least I'll always have it. That is factually true, but not psychologically true. We adapt to our material goods.

It's this process of hedonic adaptation that makes it so hard to buy happiness through material purchases. The new dress or the fancy car provides a brief thrill, but we soon come to take it for granted.

Experiences, on the other hand, tend to meet more of our underlying psychological needs, says Prof. Gilovich. They're often shared with other people, giving us a greater sense of connection, and they form a bigger part of our sense of identity. If you've climbed in the Himalayas, that's something you'll always remember and talk about, long after all your favorite gadgets have gone to the landfill.

And, crucially, we tend not to compare our experiences with other people so much. Keeping up with the Joneses is much more prominent for material things than for experiential things, he says. Imagine you've just bought a new computer that you really like, and I show up and say I've paid the same amount for the one with a brighter monitor and faster processor. How much would that bug you?

In experiments he has run, it bugs people a lot. But when people are told to imagine they've gone on vacation to New Zealand, and someone else has had a slightly better vacation, it bothers people somewhat, but you still have your own experiences and your own memories, and so it tends to trouble you less.

In a recent paper called Waiting for Merlot, Prof. Gilovich and colleagues showed that we also get more pleasure out of anticipating experiences than anticipating the acquisition of material things. People waiting for an event were generally excited, whereas waiting for material things seemed to have an impatient quality.

Don't adapt to what you buy.

One of the main reasons why having more stuff doesn't always make us happy is that we adapt to it. Human beings are remarkably good at getting used to changes in their lives, especially positive changes,says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside. If you have a rise in income, it gives you a boost, but then your aspirations rise too. Maybe you buy a bigger home in a new neighborhood, and so your neighbors are richer, and you start wanting even more. You've stepped on the hedonic treadmill. Trying to prevent that or slow it down is really a challenge.

One approach that can work, she says, is consciously trying to foster appreciation and gratitude for what you have. The process of adaptation, after all, comes from taking what you have for granted, so you can slow it down by reminding yourself of why you value what you have.

It could be as simple as setting aside time every day to follow the traditional advice of counting your blessings. Or you might want to keep a daily journal or express your gratitude to other people. The key is to find a way to remain conscious of everything you own and avoid simply adapting to having it around.

Because you're working against your natural inclination, Prof. Lyubomirsky acknowledges that feelings of gratitude and appreciation can be very difficult to sustain. If your journal or daily list becomes just a stale routine, it will no longer have much effect. You might have to keep switching techniques.

Increasing variety, novelty or surprise can also help you to enjoy your possessions more. When things become unchanging, that's when you adapt to them, Prof. Lyubomirsky says.

If you keep a painting hanging in the same spot on the same wall, for example, you'll stop noticing it after a while. But swap it with a painting from another room, and you'll see each of them with fresh eyes, and appreciate them more. Try sharing your possessions with other people, too, and opening yourself up to new experiences, she says.

This could even mean depriving yourself of your possessions for a while, perhaps by lending them or sharing them with someone else. Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and co-author of the book Happy Money, recently conducted an experiment where she sent people home with a big bag of chocolate, telling some of them to eat as much of it as they could and others that they were forbidden to eat it. A third group could choose how much to eat.

The result? The people who had been forbidden from eating chocolate were able to enjoy their next chocolate bar much more than those who'd either eaten a lot or consumed their normal amount. Giving something up temporarily can actually help to preserve our capacity to enjoy it, Prof. Dunn says.

Try Giving It Away

The paradox of money is that although earning more of it tends to enhance our well-being, we become happier by giving it away than by spending it on ourselves.

That's the finding from a series of studies by Prof. Dunn. She began by handing out cash to students on campus and telling some to spend it on themselves and others to spend it on someone else. Those who spent money on other people were happier than those who treated themselves.

Prof. Dunn has since repeated the experiment in other countries across the world and has extended it to look at whether people were still happy when giving away their own money rather than free money handed to them by a professor. She found that in countries as diverse as Canada, South Africa, and Uganda, giving away money consistently made people happier. This was even true when people were giving away their own money, and even when they themselves were relatively poor.

She also worked with economists to analyze survey data from 100 countries in the Gallup World Poll, and found that people who donated money to charity were happier, in poor and rich countries alike.

The fact that we were able to observe the same effect that we'd seen in Canada in places like South Africa and Uganda was probably the biggest surprise of my career, she says. A lot of us think we'll give to charity one day, when we are richer, but actually, we see the benefits of giving even among people who are struggling to meet their own basic needs.

What moves the needle in terms of happiness is not so much the dollar amount you give, Prof. Dunn says, but the perceived impact of your donation. If you can see your money making a difference in other people's lives, it will make you happy even if the amount you gave was quite small.

Be Sure to Buy Time, Too

It's also important to consider how what you're buying will affect how you spend your time. That big house in the suburbs may seem like a good idea, but a 2004 study by Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich found that people with longer commutes reported lower overall life satisfaction, all other things being equal. They calculated that you would need a 40% raise to offset the added misery of a one-hour commute.

Use money to buy yourself better time, says Prof. Dunn. Don't buy a slightly fancier car so that you have heated seats during your two-hour commute. Buy a place close to work, so that you can use that final hour of daylight to kick a ball around in the park with your kids.

Another way to buy yourself time, Prof. Dunn says, is by outsourcing tasks you dislike. Whereas hiring personal assistants used to be the preserve of the wealthy, it is now easier and more affordable to hire freelancers and virtual assistants online to help you with either regular administration or just individual tasks.

She's currently doing research on how people actually spend the time they save by outsourcing tasks and whether it makes them happier. The preliminary findings, she says, are that most people do become happier by buying time for themselves, but only if they use the time in the right way.

Our hypothesis is that people will be much more likely to derive an emotional benefit if they think of it as windfall time and use it to do something good, rather than just taking it for granted, she says.

But while buying time is a good idea, putting a dollar value on your time may not be. In another piece of research in progress, Prof. Dunn is finding that when people think of their time as money, it makes them less likely to spend even small amounts of time on things that are not financially compensated. Seeing time as money may have a number of destructive consequences, she says.

Money Only Brings Happiness Up to a Point

When looking at all of these research results, there's an important caveat to bear in mind. Those in the field divide happiness into two components, and you need to have both parts working together to be truly happy. But only one of those components keeps improving the more you earn. The other tops out after a certain point.

The first measure of happiness is evaluative. Prof. Lyubomirsky defines it as a sense that your life is good, you're satisfied with your life, you're progressing towards your life goals.That's the measure used by economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, who have conducted extensive research comparing economic data and happiness surveys across the world. We found very clear evidence that in just about every country around the world, rich people are happier than poor people,says Prof. Wolfers. And people in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries.

The other component of happiness affective looks at how often you experience positive emotions like joy, affection, and tranquility, as opposed to negative ones, explains Prof. Lyubomirsky. You could be satisfied with your life overall but you may not actually be happy at the time, she says. Of course, happy people experience negative emotions, just not as often. So you have to have both components.

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton of Princeton University found that when they looked at affective measures, happiness did not rise after a household reached an annual income of approximately $75,000. (They did, however, find a consistent rise in overall life satisfaction, matching the results of Profs. Wolfers and Stevenson.)

The bottom line: When you don't have much money, a little extra can go a long way, because you have more essential needs to fulfill. As you accumulate more wealth, however, it becomes more difficult to keep buying more happiness.

Don't Get in Over Your Head

Finally, although much of the research in this field is on spending money rather than saving it, the researchers agree that spending more than you can afford is a route to misery. Taking care of your basic needs and achieving a level of financial security is important.

Prof. Gilovich says that although his research shows that life experiences give more happiness than material goods, people should of course buy the essentials first. His findings hold true across a broad range of income levels and demographic groups, but not for people with very low incomes. Those people don't really have discretionary income; it pretty much all has to go on necessities, he says.

Some studies, meanwhile, have shown that debt has a detrimental effect on happiness, while savings and financial security tend to boost it. A survey of British households found that those with higher levels of debt reported lower happiness, and a separate piece of research on married couples showed that those in more debt had more marital conflict.

Savings are good for happiness; debt is bad for happiness. But debt is more potently bad than savings are good, Prof. Dunn says. From a happiness perspective, its more important to get rid of debt than to build savings.

So before you go out and spend all your money on a dream vacation, make sure you've taken care of the basics, paid off your debts, and have enough money to shield yourself from the worst of life's troubles.

Financial advisers are actually right, Prof. Howell says. The first thing you should be doing with your money is building up a safety net. If you go into debt to buy these great life experiences, the stress you'll feel when the credit card bill comes in will probably wipe out the good that you got from the experience.

Mr. Blackman is a writer in Crete. He can be reached at [email protected].

What valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value isn't enough -- you also need to capture some of the value you create. This means that even very big businesses can be bad businesses. For example, U.S. airline companies serve millions of passengers and create hundreds of billions of dollars of value each year. But in 2012, when the average airfare each way was $178, the airlines made only 37 cents per passenger trip. Compare them to Google, which creates less value but captures far more. Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the airlines), but it kept 21% of those revenues as profits -- more than 100 times the airline industry's profit margin that year. Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined. The airlines compete with each other, but Google stands alone. Economists use two simplified models to explain the difference: perfect competition and monopoly. "Perfect competition" is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand. Every firm in a competitive market is undifferentiated and sells the same homogeneous products. Since no firm has any market power, they must all sell at whatever price the market determines. If there is money to be made, new firms will enter the market, increase supply, drive prices down and thereby eliminate the profits that attracted them in the first place. If too many firms enter the market, they'll suffer losses, some will fold, and prices will rise back to sustainable levels. Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit. The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices. Since it has no competition, it produces at the quantity and price combination that maximizes its profits. To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I'm not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: By "monopoly," I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: It hasn't competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo! Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business. How much of the world is actually monopolistic? How much is truly competitive? It is hard to say because our common conversation about these matters is so confused. To the outside observer, all businesses can seem reasonably alike, so it is easy to perceive only small differences between them. But the reality is much more binary than that. There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize. The confusion comes from a universal bias for describing market conditions in self-serving ways: Both monopolists and competitors are incentivized to bend the truth. Monopolists lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they very much want their monopoly profits to continue unmolested, they tend to do whatever they can to conceal their monopoly -- usually by exaggerating the power of their (nonexistent) competition. Think about how Google talks about its business. It certainly doesn't claim to be a monopoly. But is it one? Well, it depends: a monopoly in what? Let's say that Google is primarily a search engine. As of May 2014, it owns about 68% of the search market. (Its closest competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo!, have about 19% and 10%, respectively.) If that doesn't seem dominant enough, consider the fact that the word "google" is now an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary -- as a verb. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen to Bing. But suppose we say that Google is primarily an advertising company. That changes things. The U.S. search-engine advertising market is $17 billion annually. Online advertising is $37 billion annually. The entire U.S. advertising market is $150 billion. And global advertising is a $495 billion market. So even if Google completely monopolized U.S. search-engine advertising, it would own just 3.4% of the global advertising market. From this angle, Google looks like a small player in a competitive world. What if we frame Google as a multifaceted technology company instead? This seems reasonable enough; in addition to its search engine, Google makes dozens of other software products, not to mention robotic cars, Android phones and wearable computers. But 95% of Google's revenue comes from search advertising; its other products generated just $2.35 billion in 2012 and its consumer-tech products a mere fraction of that. Since consumer tech is a $964 billion market globally, Google owns less than 0.24% of it -- a far cry from relevance, let alone monopoly. Framing itself as just another tech company allows Google to escape all sorts of unwanted attention. Non-monopolists tell the opposite lie: "We're in a league of our own." Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition. Suppose you want to start a restaurant in Palo Alto that serves British food. "No one else is doing it," you might reason. "We'll own the entire market." But that is only true if the relevant market is the market for British food specifically. What if the actual market is the Palo Alto restaurant market in general? And what if all the restaurants in nearby towns are part of the relevant market as well? These are hard questions, but the bigger problem is that you have an incentive not to ask them at all. When you hear that most new restaurants fail within one or two years, your instinct will be to come up with a story about how yours is different. You'll spend time trying to convince people that you are exceptional instead of seriously considering whether that is true. It would be better to pause and consider whether there are people in Palo Alto who would rather eat British food above all else. They may well not exist. In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was then the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors -- maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother's recipe -- your business is unlikely to survive. The problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of profits. Imagine you're running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You're not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you've got to fight hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you'll need to squeeze out every efficiency: That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back. A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google's motto -- "Don't be evil" -- is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits. So a monopoly is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do outsize profits come at the expense of the rest of society? Actually, yes: Profits come out of customers' wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation -- but only in a world where nothing changes. In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up. But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren't just good for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better. Even the government knows this: That is why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). It is possible to question whether anyone should really be awarded a monopoly simply for having been the first to think of something like a mobile software design. But something like Apple's monopoly profits from designing, producing and marketing the iPhone were clearly the reward for creating greater abundance, not artificial scarcity: Customers were happy to finally have the choice of paying high prices to get a smartphone that actually works. The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don't strangle innovation. With Apple's iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft's decadeslong operating system dominance. Before that, IBM's hardware monopoly of the 1960s and '70s was overtaken by Microsoft's software monopoly. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cellphone plan from any number of providers. If the tendency of monopoly businesses was to hold back progress, they would be dangerous, and we'd be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can't dream of. So why are economists obsessed with competition as an ideal state? It is a relic of history. Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century physicists: They see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms, not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that is what's easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But the long-run equilibrium predicted by 19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to rest -- also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it is a powerful metaphor. In business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death. If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won't matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place. Perfect equilibrium may describe the void that is most of the universe. It may even characterize many businesses. But every new creation takes place far from equilibrium. In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business. Tolstoy famously opens "Anna Karenina" by observing: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.

According to the article above by Peter Thiel do you think perfect competition is best for the economy and for consumers? Why or why not? What does Peter Thiel think about perfect competition versus monopolies?

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