It’s really not a perfect metaphor for capitalism though. Just look at any high street in a less than prosperous town. Landlords may own the buildings, but if people can’t afford to run businesses or pay for services, they sit vacant or are sold off to other people who can run other businesses with different profit potential.
Monopoly is too simplistic because the rents are fixed. If the owners of the properties were able to set the rents variably at whatever the demand could afford, and the game modelled mortgage rates and inflation, then this would be a suitable critique.
Of course it’s a big simplification. Even the concept that you have to pay rent on the square you land on. Not having the choice which building you want to rent makes variable rents completely useless.
Because if you don’t have a choice and have to pay rent on the field you land on, why would the owner of that building do anything but maximize the rent?
But it was never intended to be a perfect model of capitalism, but instead a simple tool to teach regular people why monopoles suck and using a property tax as the single tax is better.
And do you also know why this is the case?
Because Monopoly originally was two games. One that basically works like Monopoly, with the outcome described in the the post, and another one, the “anti-monopolist” version was based on the concept of just paying tax for the land you own, which makes it more expensive for one person to own a lot of the board. This version never ended.
Elisabeth Magie created the game (called “The Landlord’s Game”) with these two rule sets to teach people about Georgism, which is a system in which tax is only raised on the land you own. It should show people that a system leading to monopoles is bad, and Georgism is good.
Then the Parker Brothers bought the rights to the game from someone who didn’t own them, dropped the Georgism version and sold it with a rich, fat, old, white man on the covers who swims in money and is super happy, which kinda teaches exactly the opposite that Elisabeth Magie intended.
Then they used their position in the market to crowd out all the other versions of that game.
A truely American story, once the Parker Brothers entered the game -.-
Interesting! I never actually played it but I always thought the point was that it was shitty if you actually had to live that way, it’s called monopoly after all
I played it quite a few times as a kid (my family always wanted to play it for reasons that are beyond my understanding) and I always saw it as “You really want to become a millionaire, then you win, and screw the poor losers that didn’t make it”.
A game developed to show the inevitable failure of late stage capitalism becomes highly successful and kills all other competitors. Fate is cruel and twisted.
To be fair, in 1904 wasn’t exactly late stage capitalism yet, but it was failing maybe even more than now. Actually, there aren’t many stages of capitalism where it didn’t massively fail the poorer people.
Got any links for more information on this?
Thanks, you where faster than me.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War!
How about a nice game of chess?
