A theoretical relationship exists between a company’s size and how much they care about their customers’ health.

At a very small size, there are few enough customers that if there are detrimental health effects of your product, your business may quickly tank the little foothold it has.

At a a medium to large size, health of your customers becomes a variable to control, in terms of both liability and product deterrence.

(There exists an actuarial table somewhere showing just how unhealthy a given hamburger can be without cutting into profits, and the standard deviations therein.)

Only when a company becomes a monopoly do they again care about the health of their customers, and this time it’s because they ostensibly want to maximize their lifetime customer value. Assuming they have optimized the rest, they are interested in keeping customers alive as long as possible.

By the same token, these same monopolies (in an economic vacuum, of course) would oppose policies that might reduce the global population, as their market is primarily defined by the boundaries of human existence. Similarly, they would likely support legislation pushing for cash to be put in the hands of younger and older people, so that the time period the customers are able to spend expands on either end.

(It just so happens that the majority of businesses you consume from unfortunately fit in the medium-to-large size.)

The Health Conscious Monopoly


It is impossible and perhaps not useful to avoid selection bias.

Selection bias is everything


Getting the first step right seems to be the most important, yet iteration and adjustment can make every step carry similar value and flex. However, when retrospectively evaluating, it’s difficult to re-evaluate a narrative. Narratives are cohesive, while life and development is iterative and unpredictable. Much of the organizational strife between product and engineering is that narratives tend to sell better than big balls of uncertainty, and yet the engineers are responsible for taking the narrative and forging through the uncertainty to carve out the narrative.

Jonathan Cutrell

Selection bias is everything