Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie:
"Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.
Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.
Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"
There have been many games that purport to demonstrate that free markets are a failure, all of them had to rig the rules to make that happen.
Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-win solutions are pretty much impossible.
Of course you can make more. Build a 10 story building and you've got 10x the floor space. People do that all the time in places were land is in short supply. Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually work.
And how often can you repeat this until you have effectively solved the optimum, and the situation devolves into zero-sum anyway? Are we growing the pie, or are we just rediscovering how big the pie is by optimizing better?
>Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually work.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. As far as I understand, the idea of Monopoly isn't to show how markets work. Its to show how finite resources such as land interact on a semi-free market. Which is exactly why lots of countries are now having problems with investors, foreign or not, buying up everything and driving up prices.
In addition to my excellent sibling's note that this is a very finite solution to a boundless problem, land has a lot more uses than living space. Let's see a 10 story runway.
There is no such thing as a free market for housing, because the only thing stopping someone else from squatting in your house and telling you to get bent at any time is the government.
Land is inherently limited, and becomes more limited the higher the population concentration. Eventually this can lead to things like AirBnB and other rent seeking behaviors in the absence of government intervention leading to gentrification.
> because the only thing stopping someone else from squatting in your house and telling you to get bent at any time is the government.
You're suggesting the government is anti-ethical to the free market. On the contrary, the government is required for a free market. The role of government is protection of property rights and contract enforcement.
> Land is inherently limited
Land use, however, is not limited. For example, building a 10 story building increases the amount of usable "land" by a factor of 10.
“Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it.”
This seems like an arbitrary cut-off point. How do we know that if the game were to continue the result wouldn’t end up being the same, with one player still controlling a monopoly of all the properties?
I believe that there has always been land taxes here in the US. I'd love for the US to break up some of these huge overpowering companies today though.
US mostly has a Property Tax for state or local governments, which is different from a Land Value Tax. The property tax is levied based on the value of your property, which includes all improvements made to the property. A land value tax is specifically levied against the value of the land itself, and ignores the value of any buildings and improvements or the use value of the land you're on.
Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.
as the article points out the game was in particular desgigned to show the economic effects of private land rent, hence the original title 'the landlord's game', and that is in fact a zero sum game as they aren't making any more of it.
And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous growth. (A lot of it ironically arguably not real productivity growth but rent collection through platforms and market power).
In many ways the tech startups of today look more like digital landlords than innovators whose disruption is primarily taking over the market from a host of competitors rather than improving process efficiency. If we were living in Fordist times and the assembly line and other innovations delivered 6-7% growth annually, then we could rave on about non-zero sum economies. Total factor productivity growth these days is relatively non-existent.
"We"? What is being counted here, the average income and wealth?
Of course people are better off with food and iPhones, but in many major European cities people with middle class incomes share apartments that were literally single family worker apartments around 1900.
In terms of living space, the quality of life for the middle class is worse than 100 years ago.
There are exponentially more people today. In 1850 there were 23 million people in America, today there are 330 million. There was a 15x increase in population, with more than that in the city centers.
Texas had a population of 212k in 1850 and 29 million today. How can you compare the size of a house or land ownership then to today?
At that time land was given away via grants in Texas to anyone who would live there by the hundreds of acres. Comparing that situation to land (housing) prices in a major city today is nonsensical.
Indeed, the marxist argument is that the productivity gains of the industrial revolution would allow unprecedented human freedom, if not for their capture by the small class of people who own the means of production. The labor movement has played an enormous role in ensuring the working class gets a fairer share, via the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, etc.
We may see another example of this if Andrew Yang and other folks bullish on automation are correct. The few people who own the AI systems that replace truck drivers will get fabulously wealthy, while the large mass of workers will get nothing.
In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class.
"In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class. "
How so? The poorest working people in the US today are much much much better off than they were 50 years ago. It's not even close. A lot of people have recency bias, technology gains etc have given much more freedom to individuals, made work easier and less labor intensive, that is largely due to private industry. Globally, poverty has plunged.
Real wages have been stagnant for the vast majority of workers in the US.
And the "pulled people out of poverty" thing is such a BS stat. Converting subsistence farmers into sweat shop workers so that they they have $1.50/day instead of $0/day isn't a real metric of pulling people out of poverty. It's more a metric of how tied into the global system they are.
$1.50/day has much more purchasing power in poorer countries. Any time someone makes such a statement, I can immediately tell they are ignorant on basic economics. The US also used to have low wages for entry level workers, as did every (no developed) country. That's how progress is made. You can't expect a poor farmer with minimal skills to start making $25 an hour. And what stats am I looking at? What stats are YOU looking at? Even if you believe the notion that real wages are flat (not true,) living standards have still risen drastically thanks to technology. Do you think technology gains just come out of thin air? No, they are driven by competition and the need to profit.
I'm not holding my breath on self-driving semi trucks anytime soon. They will be the last type of vehicle to be automated. It takes a lot of skill to drive an 18 wheeler from warehouse to distribution center to warehouse. They are extremely dangerous machines if not handled properly and can easily kill dozens of people if a miscalculation occurs.
In the meantime, you could make the same argument about farming equipment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah 90% of the population used to be farmers, and yeah the equipment automated away most of that labor, but did the former farmers and laborers lose out or did they gain, by access to the same technology... either via personal automobiles or via cheaper, more reliable supply chains of abundant food.
Likewise, if and when transportation is automated, people will gain from their time saved in traffic. They will gain from cheaper costs of transportation overall which will reduce price of goods at retail. They will gain from the availability of 24/7 cheap, reliable, on-demand transportation.
And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
They're testing self driving trucks on I-70 outside of Denver specifically to test them in the worst conditions. They're not coming, they're already here.
The issue though, isn't that a specific job is going away, but instead the whole class of "human as control theory implementation" is going away. That's way more disruptive. Like, people instead becoming control software for guillotines level disruptive.
> And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.
"Real wages" mean inflation and CPI adjusted so you can actually compare them in a meaningful way. They have indeed been stagnant for median wage earners since the seventies.
Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the test trials in Denver? They're not already here. Even if they're 95% of the way, if that last 5% is catastrophic failure that ends in death and destruction, it's not even close to ready for production.
I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.
"From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"
> Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the test trials in Denver? They're not already here. Even if they're 95% of the way, if that last 5% is catastrophic failure that ends in death and destruction, it's not even close to ready for production.
I literally see Embark trucks going down the I-70 mountain in the snow. They are already here.
And meanwhile when you don't cherry pick a single year (and really 0.7% increase isn't something to be writing home about in the first place), they've been stagnant for decades.
I think that’s a super narrow view of tech development. Many menial jobs are being replaced by tech, and if that’s not increasing productivity than I don’t know what Ford’s assembly lines did...
I don't think it's true that many jobs are being replaced by tech. Restaurant workers, store clerks, nurses, assistances, even warehouse workers and so on are stable. Go through a list of the jobs in the US that employ most workers and none in the top 30 have been created in the last 20 years.
Many economists have pointed this out. If the 'rapid innovation' that a lot of tech entrepreneurs talk about was happening (and they have an incentive to oversell it), we would see high unemployment (as people are being replaced) together with high productivity and high GDP growth. We see no such thing. The Andrew Yang robot horror scenario is nowhere in the data.
By historical measures, the technological progress of the 1940s to late 1970s vastly outpaces today.
You can buy property and multiply its value by 10 by putting a 10 story building on it, and even sell floors on it. It happens all the time. It is simply not a fixed supply.
> Typical Caltech brat
LOL. My opinions on markets were quite atypical for Caltech students in the 1970s. They're likely even less typical today.
Setting aside opinions, I've been in business and associated with business entrepreneurs ever since Caltech. Consistently, those with positive outlooks and willingness to take action have done very well. Those with negative views and a victim mentality have all done poorly.
Most people can't afford to buy property. That's sort of the crux of this discussion. Half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and about the same amount have less than $10k in the bank.
> I've been in business and associated with business entrepreneurs ever since Caltech. Consistently, those with positive outlooks and willingness to take action have done very well.
Yes, people who have money can easily acquire more money. Most people don't start out with money though, so it's rather selfish to judge the world solely from this perspective.
I just drove from Seattle to Albuquerque, through vast tracts of empty land. Land is politically, not physically scarce. That's even true right around major metropoli, let alone the hinterlands. And even that doesn't count unused potential square footage along the vertical axis. The truly constraining axis isn't x, y or z, but NIMBY.
Empty land because its rainfall is insufficient to grow traditional crops. Worse, the water table in much of it is quite deep and the groundwater opportunities are scarce (and becoming more so). Compare with the US east coast where its pretty much impossible to throw a rock these days an not hit someone's house. Even in the rural areas people are frequently on plots of land that wouldn't support them without intensive industrialized farming.
Check out the "field lab" video's for a now ten year video blog posting of the hardships of attempting to live off the land in the arid SW us. Somewhere along the way he started saying "i'm just not someone who can grow crops". But in reality, its more a case of he can't grow crops because they don't survive 100F summers, or seasons without a lot of rainfal. If the weeds are having a hard time growing, your potato's/whatever are probably not going to be doing well.
edit: just to point out the redundancy, if you go read the newspapers in any of the major cities in the SW what you will frequently read about is water woes. Overwhelmingly those cities ability to supply water at the projected population growth rates are questionable.
I understand that land is finite, but you'll need to explain further how tech is at all similar, or else I'm not sure it's a good metaphor. Monopolistic platforms aren't great, and I'm also no fan of competitive inefficiency, but how is any of this like land? It sounds like you're implying it becomes impossible at some point to make more tech?
It is zero sum, because no intentional action can increase wealth. Only the gradual, chance-based progression of new money into the game.
In contrast, if I take out a loan and build a successful business, my intentional actions (successful business) lead to greater money supply than if I had failed at business.
Does that make sense, or am I missing something? I'll admit, the creation of new wealth/money is very mysterious. How to know when it is growing the pie?
Your intentional action is to start a business. Whether or not it will be a successful business and actually "generate wealth" is to a large part dependant an chance.
Also, honestly, "It's not a zero-sum game" is beginning to sound like a religious mantra. Of course you can define "wealth" however your want and for the right definitions, you can certainly pull ever more of it out of nowhere. The set of natural numbers has no upper bound.
However, many extremely relevant kinds of wealth absolutely are zero-sum: There is only so much time in a day, only so much space to live in, only so many natural resources and only so much waste the planet will tolerate. If some class of people control disproportionately amounts of that, it will absolutely reduce the wealth of those who don't belong to that class.
No, it's not dependent on chance. It's not some random spin on a roulette wheel. It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the marketplace.
There may be only so much time in a day, but the critical factor in wealth creation is how much you can get done in a day (productivity). You can also figure out clever ways to get more out of what you have (efficiency).
It's not failing if you didn't waste time and you still have 100% of your capital in the bank. I'm also not saying nobody should take risks, or that you can't create your own luck, just pointing out that there's an element of chance in every success.
A common thread I've noticed in people who say it's all luck is they never recognize when they are being lucky, and good fortune passes them by, unnoticed. Successful people feel lucky because they notice good luck and take advantage.
For example - odds are very good you're healthy. That's lucky! You live in the US - a lucky place to start a business! The internet makes it easy - lucky! You have an education - more great luck! If not, there's a free youtube video on just about anything you need to learn - what great luck!
>> It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the marketplace
And who decides what is valued by the marketplace?
It's:
- Politicians through regulation.
- The Federal Reserve Bank by continuously creating new money out of thin air.
- Banks by deciding who can get the newly printed Fed money through loans and who can't (typically based on the value of assets which individuals already have; the result is that rich people get most of the new money through almost 0% interest loans).
- Corporate monopolies by locking out competitors (through lobbying government for beneficial regulations or making it prohibitively expensive for other companies to compete due to price gouging, international tax arbitrage, allowing losses in some sectors to selectively wipe out competitors in other sectors, incentivizing journalists to promote the corporate agenda, etc...)
As a small startup, you can be as efficient as you like. If some corporation doesn't want you to succeed, they can easily drain your coffers and crush you without drawing any attention to themselves. It's not about productivity or cleverness; that has very little value these days. Economic value these days lies in one's ability to control the social narrative and the money supply; it doesn't matter what the reality is.
If you have unlimited money, you can literally pay people to sit on their asses and pick their noses all day; you can even convince them that this is helping the company and therefore the whole economy... The company keeps getting more money year after year so somehow all this nose-picking must be paying off right?
The massive hose of Federal Reserve cash plugged straight into the back of the company is just a minor detail.
And the farmers who feed everyone are fools for accepting this electronic play money in exchange for their useful work.
Regulation is a reaction to demand, it's not what creates demand. We can debate about the pros and cons of regulation, but that is quite a tangent. Certainly some businesses are prohibited by the existence of stringent regulations. Certainly regulations make it more expensive to start a business in certain industries. But they do not determine what the market wants.
The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services. That demand is there, all the time. Right now there is latent demand in the marketplace to extend the human lifespan to 1000 years if possible. There's demand to travel at the speed of light or faster. Whether or not these things are even possible is completely independent of the demand for them.
It's also quite absurd that on the tail end of a decade of a start up boom in the tech industry that you would assert that all these factors make it impossible to succeed today. We are on Hacker News, a site powered by YCombinator, an incubator and investor that has helped make it possible for hundreds of companies to succeed that you claim is impossible. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019. None of these companies existed 15 years ago.
Y Combinator is completely out of reach for most people. There are limited slots and tens of thousands of applicants. It makes the whole selection process essentially pseudo-random.
Also, Y Combinator is not popular because it is successful, it is successful because it is popular.
It's no coincidence that Y Combinator operates the most popular technology news link aggregator in the world which all the big corporate tech executives read. This significantly affects the odds of success for startups which join Y Combinator. They choose who wins and it doesn't matter who they choose. If you are selected into YC, it's like winning the lottery.
They should do an experiment; filter out all the obvious scam applications then for all remaining applications (tens of thousands of them probably) run a random number generator to select startups based on keywords that YC likes. I bet the success rate for that batch wouldn't be very different from previous batches.
All of the mechanics available to the Fed and Politicians are large imprecise tools. Regular people still have unmet needs and successful businesses are still started all the time to meet those needs.
The phrase “zero sum game”, taken as referring to the game theory thing, “zero sum games”, isn’t about wealth, but about utility (though sometimes utility could be modeled as just being wealth).
To say that something isn’t zero sum in this sense is a rather weak statement. If any combination of actions by people result in at least one person being worse off and no one else being better off, or in at least one person being better off and no one else being worse off, than some other combination of choices, that is sufficient to conclude that it isn’t zero sum. (This isn’t a necessary condition, only a sufficient one. But a Pareto difference (terminology?) implies a difference in the sum of utilities (assuming that there is a sensible way to add the utilities) without assuming a particular way to add utilities between persons, so I think it is easier to justify conceptually.)
That many things involving multiple people are not zero sum, in this sense, is obvious. (Punching a stranger in the face for no reason decreases the utility of the stranger without increasing one’s own. Well, for most people anyway?) It doesn’t imply that there are no limits to how good outcomes can be.
That a given thing is not zero sum is often something that would be sufficiently trivial as to not be worth saying, except that people talk about the thing as if it is zero sum.
If things were constrained to be on the Pareto frontier, then, while possibly still not zero sum, there would I think be less reason to point out that things aren’t zero sum even if they weren’t.
Pointing out that things aren’t zero sum is often, I think, effectively a call to take into account whether options would move closer to or further from the Pareto frontier, and not just pretend that things are always on the Pareto frontier and try to move along the Pareto frontier.
Now, if, within a certain context, the maximum distance it is possible to be from the Pareto frontier is negligible, then in those cases exclaiming “care more about the distance to the Pareto frontier!” wouldn’t seem to make much sense,
and perhaps even sometimes justice requires putting more emphasis on where on the frontier we are closest to than how close we are to it, even if it means non-negligible difference in closeness to the frontier.
But, generally speaking, Pareto improvements are good and important, and forbidding people from taking actions that result in global Pareto improvements (I don’t just mean “if you only consider these people, then among these people it is a Pareto improvement”, but rather things that are Pareto improvements when considering everyone’s interests) is usually bad.
I would argue that if I hold 2 of the yellow and 1 of the green properties and you hold 1 of the yellow and 2 of the green in a 3+ person game, that we do have an intentional action that can leave us both better off.
If the two people involved in the two people involved in the trade are exactly x better off and the, lets say, two people not involved in the trade are exactly x worse off, that transaction is still zero-sum.
Zero-sum games are not limited to two player games.
You are only better off in the sense of having more opportunities to collect rent from each other. The result is still zero-sum.
Here’s a mental shortcut: as long as the objective of the game is to bankrupt all other players (i.e. to own all of the money), the game is zero-sum. No other details matter. It’s a cake-cutting game where everybody wants all the cake.
> Borrowing: A player may borrow from the “Bank" in amounts of one hundred dollars, and for every one hundred dollars borrowed the " Bank" takes a mortgage on one or more of the borrower's lots, the total value of which must be at least ten dollars more than is borrowed. For every one hundred dollars borrowed from the "Bank" a bank mortgage is placed upon the property on which the loan is made, and the player puts his note in the "Bank," paying upon each note five dollars (interest) every time he receives his wages. One player may borrow from another, giving a mortgage on any property he may own and making the best bargain he can as to interest, terms of payments &c. The player loaning the money places his individual, mortgage on the top of the borrower's deed to show that he has a mortgage on that property, Should a loan be repaid before passing the beginning-point, the borrower saves the interest.
But there are a few variations... This one looks closer to "modern" monopoly - I can't seem to locate the "two rulesets" referenced by Wikipedia though (one "pro" one "contra" monopoly - in the second everyone supposedly benefits from created value).
> Magie created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.
Yeah of course because you have full control of what happens to your business.
Your competitors, big corporate monopolies, regulators, investors, fickle cultural trends, politics, timing, your wealthy friends or family members and your own health have no impact at all on your business' chance of success.
Running a business is an exercise in risk management. All of the things you mentioned are interesting challenges, but they're not insurmountable. While there are few guarantees in life, one sure fired way to lose to all those factors is to make them bigger than they are.
You're confusing your hypothetical personal success with the state of the system as a whole.
Most businesses will fail, and most businesses are built on loans of some kind rather than bootstrapped.
Rent-seekers will try to profit from this because they will claw back their "investment" in the form of collateral - preferably physical, but IP as a last resort.
If businesses succeed, rent-seekers will profit from their "investment" with an aggressive term sheet that gives their return priority over returns for the people who did the work.
At the same time, rent-seekers will be investing in property. If there's a run of successful businesses in an area they will gain by increasing rents and speculating on property prices.
This is basically just asset inflation - very good for rent-seekers, very bad for people who need access to limited resources like housing and health care.
This isn't even getting into the costs of externalities.
The picture as a whole is a lot more complicated than "My business succeeded and now I'm making money, so there's no zero sum here."
Without the loan up front, most businesses never get off the ground to begin with. You're calling lenders "rent-seekers" like they don't provide a valuable, essential service that underpins the whole economy. If I want to start a business, I can either 1) raise capital in exchange for equity, 2) borrow money at a set interest rate or 3) save money for years until I personally have enough to start a company.
For many types of businesses, option 1 isn't a tenable option. Outside of the tech industry, the margins are lower and there is not a large network of VC angels for things like restaurants, farms, retail stores, home services, etc.
The classic example would be farming equipment. Sure, you could save for 10 years to buy an International Harvester Combine. Or you could borrow money to buy the Combine today, your efficiency goes up 10x and you pay off the loan with the higher profits you reap. Then, if you want to expand your farm, you might likewise save for 10 years to buy another plot of land...or you could borrow money today and buy that land and use leverage to grow quicker. The loan created wealth by enabling the farmer to become more productive.
At the same time, rent-seekers will be investing in property. If there's a run of successful businesses in an area they will gain by increasing rents and speculating on property prices.
And if they are speculating and the market goes south, they will lose their investment.
Yes, that's the american dream. The problem with america is too many people believe the american dream, that you can go 'rags to riches' with hard work and perseverance.
The people working 90 hour weeks and barely able to make rent apparently aren't working hard enough.
You can. I used to work in a retirement community in Florida. I met thousands of retirees who either through their own business or from stock earned in a corporate job or from a solid 401K savings had more than $1 million in net worth. There's more than 10 million households with a net worth of over $1 million in the U.S [1]. It's not hard work and perseverance that matters. It's smart work and money management that matters.
Perfect example for survivorship bias. To live in a retirement community you have to have money. So, when you work in a retirement community you see retired people who have money. What you don't see are all the people who made the same decisions, did the same things, but for some reason didn't end up in a retirement community in Florida.
There's plenty of lower-income retirement communities in Florida too. You can buy homes there for $100K or so, so you don't even need to be a millionaire. I would say, that if 1 in 30 Americans are millionaires, that is direct evidence that it's not some impossible, unachievable dream. 1 in 3 have a net worth greater than $200K.
What you're saying is that the majority of people have a net worth
So working harder than the majority of people will still mean you end up with a tiny net worth, the fear of bankrupcy from medical bills at any point in life, the fear of losing your home (if you're lucky enough to get a home in the first place)
America is a country where cops arrest 6 year old girls for the crime of being black. The american dream? Hah. Look at the american reality.
1 in 30 'make it'. 29 in 30 don't, and life is hell for them.
To the above comment I can't reply to, no, the median income in the U.S. is $63K. It's far from hell and no other country produces the abundance we have at the scale we do. Get outside the U.S. and go see the other 95% of the world.
>It is zero sum, because no intentional action can increase wealth
It's a probability game. The action of buying a property increases wealth proportionate to the risk of someone landing on it, hence that intentional action increases wealth as a function.
That doesn't make the game zero sum, especially when you add in the variable income bits of passing go or mortgaging properties.
I'll admit, the creation of new wealth/money is very mysterious. How to know when it is growing the pie?
Wealth is stuff that people want. You create wealth by creating stuff that other people want. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html has a long version of this explanation.
The last 200 years have seen a dramatic transformation as we have found ways to efficiently create more wealth, with the result that we all have more stuff that we want than pretty much anyone used to. Both new kinds of stuff (effective medicine, gadgets like washing machines, electronic devices...) and the kinds of stuff we used to have (food, potable water, etc...).
And yet, people still emotionally fall prey to the old fallacy that more for thee means less for me. The truth is that there is no society on record that has managed to lower inequity without major disaster such as war or plague. And also no society on record that has managed to increase the prosperity of the poor without seeing income gaps rise.
(Read Enlightenment Now for a lot more detail on both of these phenomena.)
The game is strictly zero-sum, you win by bankrupting your opponents. The amount of money in circulation has nothing to do with whether it's zero sum or not, it's the distribution of money-- and in monopoly, the goal is to have it distributed to _one_ person.
P.S. Just because this also bothered me: inflation doesn't happen during the game. Land itself does not increase in value during the course of the game, it only increases with direct capital expenditures. Example: if no one buys "Park Place" for 90% of a game, it does not increase in cost the cost for the player who eventually buys it[1], that cost is fixed throughout the game.
[1] Despite its marginal utility (i.e. value) for each player increasing as the game goes on. In that example, it's nice because utility increase whether you have Broadway (I think thats the other piece) or not (preventing someone from building on it is a strategy too).
That's not real wealth though. The houses and hotels are the actual capital improvements.
The thing is, supply and demand seem not to matter in the housing market. If you land on Park Place you can't shop around for alternatives.
This might be retconned by saying that most housing is occupied and that's where you found a vacancy, but it's still pretty artificial. If the other houses are occupied then why isn't anyone getting any income from them?
> That's not real wealth though. The houses and hotels are the actual capital improvements.
That doesn't make Monopoly any more zero-sum. You're not generally limited by the supply of hotels. If I build a hotel where there were four houses before, the total capital stock has increased, not stayed constant.
> You're not generally limited by the supply of hotels
A strong strategy in Monopoly is leveraging the fact that houses and hotels _are_ in limited supply. There are only 32 houses available and you can't build a hotel unless you have 4 houses on each property in a set. If you end up with 3 monopolies with 4 houses on each property the game is pretty much over because nobody else is able to invest in anything.
Just to point out, if you're strangling the house supply with the result that nobody can build hotels, it is obviously true that nobody is being limited by the supply of hotels.
...But any real Capitalist would then see the opportunity to stop investing in real estate, leverage his real estate as collateral, and build more houses. Thereby increasing supply, and creating even more wealth by offering his new houses to the other players.
Of course this would pressure the house hoarder into building hotels... Except each other player gets a set of dice, and on rolling anything higher than a 4, his hotel construction is thwarted by decree of the community's zoning board. UNLESS he's making deals under the table, increasing number he has to roll under to get approval from the zoning board.
> If the other houses are occupied then why isn't anyone getting any income from them?
I think you're talking about profit here. If you're going to take the metaphor seriously I think you'd have to assume income is coming in if the houses are maintained. Your profit is the money you take from the other players. If you land on Park Place, you specifically need Park Place, and you're forced to pay a premium. As the property owner you're waiting for those premiums to overtake the initial outlay used to build the houses.
> This might be retconned by saying that most housing is occupied and that's where you found a vacancy, but it's still pretty artificial.
Actually this just sounds like the California housing market where NIMBYs perpetually prevent housing stock from increasing, which is of course a result of central planning, not a free market mechanism, LOL!
It's not purely "free market" to restrict housing supply, but the freedom to influence politics to your own advantage (like NIMBY's restricting housing supply) is absolutely an effect of the free market system.
Capitalism is not exactly equal to "free market". There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism.
I'm just pointing out that you have to regulate SOMETHING. Regulating nothing = people amassing wealth and buying political influence = those current power holders regulating everyone else so the current power holders just continue to win. Then you don't have your "free market" anymore. It's inherently unstable.
In my opinion, the wealthy should have no more political power than the poor. But of course the wealthy have an outsized ability to influence politics. So they can work to repeal or nullify the very laws meant to reduce their influence - it's a fight that will never end and requires working and poor people to constantly be aware, organizing, and participating in politics to have any chance at all.
Or maybe one day, in my dream world, the rich and powerful will realize hey it's not so bad to have a workforce that is educated and healthy and has enough money in their pocket to buy the things we produce without taking out loans! And then we all leave in peace and harmony...
> There's still a hell of a lot of market under socialism
Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing -- yet most people want the same thing -- it's really frustrating. I view it as a really important failure of science and philosophy. And a great opportunity for simulations in the service of empirical morality.
Which reminds me: Adam Smith's advisor wrote a whole tract on "Moral Computation" back in the early 1700s
> Completely agree. It's frustrating, because with words like "capitalism" and "socialism", why use words at all? Nobody means the same thing
And there's the reason why, in my original post at the beginning of this sub-thread, I used neither of those terms, in order to communicate more precisely.
Centrally planned economies are inferior to freer economies, whether the top-down controls are imposed by democracy or autocracy; both create economic inefficiencies. History has borne that out repeatedly.
But of course, that statement disregards non-economic externalities like environmental impacts, and one may want a central power to map non-economic externalities onto economic costs through e.g. taxes and fines for polluting because the economic inefficiencies incurred are worth the tradeoff (like having clean water/air). Then the market can price those non-economic externalities accordingly, once the market is appropriately regulated.
There is a bit of a puzzle because many large corporations do pretty well with hierarchical planning and competition involves lots of duplicate effort. The markets also seem to encourage centralization for economy of scale? (Consider big tech, the airline industry, and index funds.)
I often wonder if there could be a feasible system by which things inside a large company could be run by a market-like thing, and whether that could end up using work more efficiently.
I hear about some part of a company requesting another part do some market research on some topic, and then just entirely disregard the results, when the market research department could have used that effort and time and money to do some other more useful market research that would have actually been used,
and I wonder whether there could be some way to make sure that the requests to another department that something be done, have appropriate costs in some sense.
If one was better off by not requiring some other department do some work that doesn’t actually get used than if one does produce such a requirement for them, then presumably one would try to be less likely to produce such requirements, which seems desirable.
Is there a realistic feasible way to do this? I don’t know.
Companies do experiment with this sometimes as part of the budget-making process, as well as internal competition. I haven't heard of any big wins though.
It seems better to take internal functions and open them up to outside customers, as the cloud computing companies do.
Each of these systems is degrees of the other as well, and that seems proper for the exact reasons you mentioned - not including desired externalities in pricing/market dynamics.
There are a few things that I believe only work in a moral way when they are taken out of the hands of capitalist pursuit-of-profit dynamic:
* Healthcare: What does the demand curve look like when your alternative is death or a painful, limited life?
* Pollution/Environmental damage control: Without regulation the chemical company owner has zero incentive not to dump their leftovers in the creek.
* Access to quality education: Equality of opportunity
* Access to housing: Simply a question of morality. In the US at least, we have so much goddamn money and so much goddamn land and the ability to build giant buildings on that land. No one should be homeless.
You could argue that's just inflation. Total real value remains the same with every lap, it's just distributed differently between players (particularly if you count the unclaimed tiles as an extra player)
At the end of the game, yes, but if players don't try to bankrupt each other it probably won't happen.
Early in the game the expected value of a trip around the board is positive because of low rents of undeveloped properties and the net gain from Chance and Community Chest, plus passing Go. Cash flow into the game is positive as a whole.
Later in the game, when property is developed you're going to be paying bigger rents. This is going to cause players to mortgage or sell houses to pay the big rents (also their own liquid cash supply is likely lower from developing their own properties), each of which is a money sink since you don't get full value for these. This causes money to exit the game, eventually leading toward bankruptcy.
However, this requires that players actually get to develop their properties. If the game hits a lock due to no one trading and no one getting a natural monopoly, the game can go pretty much indefinitely.
> If the game hits a lock due to no one trading and no one getting a natural monopoly, the game can go pretty much indefinitely.
Yeah, I once played with someone whose strategy was "Never trade". In an act of desperation, I offered him $1,000 for a light-blue property, and he refused. The game lasted for nearly an hour before I quit out of extreme boredom.
A typical 4-player game of Monopoly should only last around 30 minutes, but people often have terrible strategies or play with ridiculous house rules that constantly inject money into the game, prolonging it. A lot of people don't even know that the house rule they're playing is even a house rule because it's what they were taught when they first learned to play.
> Yeah, I once played with someone whose strategy was "Never trade".
That's the right strategy for strong play. You should never trade property for mere money. If you absolutely have to, trade property for property if the trade gives you a monopoly, or if (in a more-than-two-player game) doing so gives you a net increase in the number of groups for which you hold at least one property (so you can block anyone from getting a monopoly in those groups without trading with you).
It's not an especially fun strategy, either for you or the people you're playing with.
> Money increases when you pass start, and cards drawn are on average a source of money.
Money itself is of value only if it can be used to buy stuff. The assets in Monopoly are fixed - more and more money chases the same assets, meaning that the real value of that money remains the same.
Arguably we are in the process of playing monopoly. It is just not near the end yet.
We have not used up all the fixed resources yet - which is why we can keep growing, but we soon might as the population grows and the rich take as much as possible.
This is correct - but I think the point the user above is trying to make is that the game doesn't teach the most fundamental lesson of capitalism - that competition drives adaptation.
Competition driving adaptation is really important, but darwinism predates capitalism!
I'd argue that the most fundamental lesson of capitalism is that markets magically allow individual self-interest to contribute to the collective benefit
Ok, fun facts: Adam Smith got his PhD in a department of moral philosophy. His first book was about why people are nice to each other: I feel good if you feel good, I feel bad if you feel bad.
His second book, "Wealth of Nations", was also about why people are nice to each other. He described capitalism (aka market economies) as the basis for large-scale moral action. Markets and trade naturally support collective benefit.
Adam Smith wasn't extreme -- his point was to promote "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" -- a phrase coined by Adam Smith's PhD advisor, Francis Hutcheson.
But the transactions between players are zero-sum... An interesting, related point: zero-sum trading games (even ones based on chance [1]) always devolve into pareto/power law distributions when bankruptcy is a possibility. More a matter of natural law than the "evils" of capitalism
But the transactions between players are zero-sum... An interesting, related point: zero-sum trading games (even ones based on chance [1]) always devolve into pareto/power law distributions when bankruptcy is a possibility. More a matter of natural law than "evil" capitalism
From a purely monetary point of view at a global level, transactions are indeed a positive sum. But the "positive" value of transactions, globally, is remarkably small - it's effectively inflation minus population growth (between 1 and 3% yearly).
So, if your money is growing more than this 3%, someone else is losing money so you can make it.
EDIT: I figured this would be unpopular - please feel free to correct me, to point out where the money on, for example, 6% returns on investments come from if not from someone else.
So, it seems that "r > g" is less of a question and more of a generally accepted statement. I'm not an economist, but a cursory review of economist whitepapers (here's one[0]) indicates that most don't dispute the "r > g" assertion, but instead just say that "this is a reasonable state of affairs", or "it's a problem, but the solutions are worse."
I'm not sure about the non-zero sum economics models anymore. Physics says that the planet is finite, so much of the "wealth creation" is little more than changes in perceived valuation. And while a lot of people have a lot more $ and things like iphones, most people have less land, more polluted oceans, and many other things that may turn out to be move valuable in the long run than those iphones.
On the land thing, one of my grandfathers had close to 500 acres of farmland. Today I could barely pay the taxes on that land if it was still in the family. But its not, instead there are a couple dozen families living on smaller 20 acre plots.
Monopoly is about land, and monopoly teaches people a correct view of land: land is a zero-sum game.
It is striking how much real-life has mirrored monopoly: when the game starts and there is plenty of land to go around, there are no problems. After a while, the land runs out, and the wealthy hoard the land and charge the others for its use. The wealthy then get wealthier and the poor get poorer.
We are now in the later stages of the real-life monopoly match.
Wealth may not be zero-sum within the narrow artificial scope of "money", but power is zero sum. Wealth viewed as money is a sneaky neaningless distraction. Wealth viewed outside of power is meaningless.
Lets say bob and alice are in a room. They both have a nerf gun. Now bob gets a machine gun and alice gets another nerf gun. So the "wealth" in the room increased. But the power in the room didn't increase. It shifted from 50/50 between bob and alice to 100/0.
When you view wealth superficially, it's not zero sum. When you view wealth seriously, it's zero sum.
The value of wealth isn't the pile of worthless money. The value of wealth is the power it projects over other human beings.
If everyone on earth died but jeff bezos, his wealth would be meaningless. What does $130 billion mean when only he's around? It means nothing because it can't be converted to power in a world with 1 person.
I'd argue that in terms of land/housing market, in an established, multi-centuries contiguous (ie not disrupted by revolution, nationalization, large redistribution) urbanized area it becomes a zero-sum game and hence all the problems that entails.
IMO this is more or less the inevitable result of long surviving land ownership rights. You can see this in the correlation between home ownership rates and when was the last time land was nationalized/redistributed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
What do the top 10 countries have in common: they were communist dictatorships in the previous century were all land was taken and managed by the state.
What do the bottom 10 countries have in common: very long standing property rights with no redistribution in the last few centuries.
Not saying that what we need is nationalization/revolution but simply pointing out statistics and trends which may help inform people in order to counter their effects.
I'm sure those limits exist, but who's to say we'll ever hit those limits on human timescales?
right now, global warming is an existential threat that sets an upper bound on how much energy we can responsibly use. but if we can develop carbon-neutral means of harnessing energy at scale, we can use much more. if we can develop viable space travel, we can gain access to more material resources than exist on Earth. any one of the "next steps" along the exponential curve can fail, but I wouldn't assume we will hit a hard ceiling anytime soon.
This is strange as economists agree pretty much across the board that one way of making an economy grow is to increase population. It stands to reason that one way to shrink an economy is to decrease population.
Note that I am making no comment how that growth or shrinkage affects the quality of life in that economy but when looking at total growth population change is correlated.
To take it to extremes - just to prove that overpopulation can lower output, imagine our population increased 1000x overnight, do you think in this scenario the economy will grow? I imagine this situation would not be handleable and people would be going completely crazy killing each other.
The above scenario is not realistic, but what about if population grows and grows and then comes a point where we realize that for example we have
1) Reduced potential living space by a huge margin due to for example climate change or pollution.
2) We have no idea how to solve this issue. We can't move to another planet, we don't have the tech yet even if this was possible.
There's many potential ways we could fuck up which causes there to be limited basic resources that at the very least would make the world scramble to solve this issue and produce less value because they have to focus solely on this issue and large proportion of people would have to be fending for themselves, with sometimes only options to get basic necessities is to steal from others.
Or the people who are rich, thanks to using the monopoly principles will be good because they have enough money, power and control to buy the remaining resources.
I mean yes, that's what I said. It might or might not happen. But it's just a scenario where it will be a zero-sum game or less. I'm not saying it will happen, just that it is possible.
I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.
> If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.
I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that success/failure are inherently probabilistic.
Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However, this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success and positive outcomes, period.
It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill, merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story.
From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's always correct to maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-compete you despite shortcomings).
That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example: if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the other direction.)
One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market competition. :)
“Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.”
When in reality, it’s luck and effort that matter. You can’t control the luck part, but you can control the effort part.
It's similar to health - a great deal of how healthy you are has to do with luck (e.g. genetics). If someone said "the health game is rigged so there is no use in trying to be healthy" we'd think they were nuts.
> Because luck is involved, it’s only luck that matters.
I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion from the story, it's setting up a situation that is pure luck, and asserting that people will take credit for their luck. It's not saying that everything in the real world is actually luck.
As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.
A more realistic solution would be to have one player start with half of the bank and already owning most of the properties. Two other players start with the regular starting cash. Everybody else starts with nothing. Then they must praise the first player for being such a stunning businessman if he wins.
That's not true at all. If you roll dice and only land on empty properties and corners, you'll have nothing to negotiate with. Negotiation only works if both parties have something of value and the dice determine whether players have something of value.
If you land on nothing, you have a large amount of cash compared to other players which you can leverage for negotiation.
The game isn't just who can get a monopoly first, but who can also improve it the fastest. In my experience, players often overvalue the expensive properties due to maximum rent but don't take into account the capital and therefore time required to improve them.
Often that is how things happen in the real world. When people win they look back and attribute it purely to their own hard work. Some act like assholes, too. So at least in that respect it is a good model :-)
Believe it or not there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it). Not all spaces are landed on equally, and not all properties have the same return on investment.
Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
That is true, but the rolls of the dice still have vastly more influence on the outcome than the very limited decisions that players can make. In order to decide whether or not to buy Park Place you have to land on it first.
Not necessarily. The games rules include an auction that is frequently removed in house rules. What's supposed to happen is if the player who lands on the space (Player A) doesn't buy it from the bank, the property is auctioned to all players.
Maybe no one owns Boardwalk yet, and Player A doesn't want to try and get the Park Place/Boardwalk monopoly. Or maybe Boardwalk is owned by Player B but Player B doesn't have any cash, so Player A thinks they can block the monopoly while paying less to the bank. Or maybe Player B does have the cash but Player A knows that B is desperate for the monopoly, so they want to drive the price up and force them to pay more.
There's more to than just rolling dice and landing on spaces.
You can calculate the game-theoretic value of all of the properties (I'm a little surprised that no one seems to have actually done this AFAICT -- maybe a project for next weekend). At that point the game reduces to pure luck: players who land on properties whose list price is less than their game-theoretic value will buy those properties and gain a (small) edge. The auction clearing price for rational players will be the game-theoretic value, which will have no effect on the outcome. The rest is pure luck (modulo some other obscure rule that I've forgotten then allows players to make decisions), and that is the overwhelmingly dominant factor.
It's not just property values/landing percents. If you can get a "low value" monopoly more quickly through the auction, because combined players happened to land on all the orange spaces first time around the board but they're all "rationale" and "know" that orange is low-value (I don't know if it is, just an example), then that opens up an opportunity for you to swoop in.
That might not happen every game but it is advantageous to get a monopoly sooner rather than later. Like I said earlier you can also factor in how much money your opponents have when deciding whether to go to auction or pay list price. If everyone is cash poor that opens up opportunities for you to get deeds for low cost, increasing the properties future rate of return.
The randomness in the game means you can't just pick one optimal strategy and apply it to every game and every opponent. And if your opponents change strategy (or your opponents change), you need to adapt your strategy to accommodate for that as well.
another edit: There's also a limited amount of houses/hotels the bank has, so there's strategy around getting houses first and leaving your opponents unable to build up their monopolies (another frequent house rule is that there unlimited houses too buy from the bank). If multiple players are trying to buy houses at once and there's not enough, the houses are auctioned again to the highest bidder (hello capitalism housing shortages).
You can also sell properties you own, or choose to stay in jail (frequent house rule is that you can't collect money while in jail, but this isn't an official rule).
Liquidity is a thing, and trades are a combination of properties and cash passing between people who already have holdings of properties and cash that affect the subjective values of the properties being traded.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of your proposed calculation, and think is simply boils down to calculating how often particular spaces are landed on times the amount paid when they are landed on. I mean, it does, but the second part is not so simple.
What you have is a fairly complex strategy game, and the rest is pure luck (called dice.)
edit: I'd really be interested in seeing what you come up with (or imo, at what point you'd bail out) if you were to attempt to solve Monopoly. I'm at pessimizer@yahoo.com
I'd be interested in how you calculate it. Sounds like a great project. I've seen others that point out due to how the board is laid out which properties are most likely to be landed on, but don't think I've seen theoretical value based on rents.
An even better calculation would be how much it's worth to each player based on what they already have as well!
Usually people don't pass up the chance to buy property though. It's not that there's a house rule against the auction, it just never comes up unless you have someone who is already losing badly that lands on a space that has somehow not already been snapped up.
Other than maybe the utilities, when is it not advantageous to buy a property you land on? Until an opposing monopoly exists, there is a net positive value to each turn, so you have plenty of resources and if all you do is deny the property to someone else, you essentially get it at 50% discount by mortgaging it.
On the flipside of over-extending, last time my family played we included auctioning. Didn't take long for my brother to realize he could send it to auction, bid $1 (which no one challenged because we were focused on the partially-completed colors we had), and immediately mortgage it for free money to buy houses on the properties he did care about.
I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation.
If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...
I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson.
The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies.
The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals.
Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.
Have you actually played Monopoly until the end? The winner is not usually the person that makes the most deals. It's the person who makes the best deals for the dice rolls. If you buy blue, green, and yellow blocks through deals, you're almost always guaranteed to win regardless of how many deals you've made outside of those. The remaining players can continue to make deals and, as long as you don't accept them, they can never win.
That is... false. Trading down consistently only works if you’re playing with idiots.
Trading a high value property for a low value property makes sense if you get a color set, but if you do this multiple times with bare minimum competence players, the likely outcome is that everyone has at least one set, but you have booth the lowest amount of cash to develop things and the least valuable properties.
With the exception of edge case (although often optimal) strategies where you lock down the available houses, trading down is likely a sign that you’re trying to increase your likelihood of winning from 0% to 10%, while improving the odds to a greater degree for whoever is getting the better deal.
Most properties are superficial until they have specifically 3 houses on them. If you have three color sets, but fewer than 3 houses on any of them, you’re going to lose.
Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially. Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the point of housing shortages
Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians" (as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via mere repetition.
Common ownership is the term Henry George used. Of course, keeping the title system was specifically preferred in order to limit the scope of government.
Just need to pay for the land you use, since it belongs to all.
We should, perhaps, distinguish common ownership from public ownership. The concept of the Commons is one that people ought to understand. Something can be owned in common without it being managed by the government.
George wrote a lot about the commons, and you're right that it's important to understand the relationship between state/common/private ownership, but I stand by the statement that its use here - without that context, where more common capitalist vs. communist notions of property are already being discussed - is misleading. It's like throwing "bad faith" into a discussion without being clear that it refers to a domain-specific concept from law or existentialist philosophy.
"Georgism" is actually a really great idea but the name is terrible. I remember I tried to discuss it with someone once and they chuckled when I said the word "Georgism". They couldn't actually listen to my argument.
I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and that's very difficult to do.
It is called Guyane in French. Given that the locals are not English native speakers, I fail to see how the English name influences their national identity.
And I always thought we were missing something because players would always end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought out the worst in them).
The board game Cashflow is closer to reality than Monopoly, especially the 202 version, which provides for paper assets options, as well as loss of investment properties to acts of nature. A good way to learn basic investment evaluation using play money.
Think of the WWW as a Monopoly board. Except unlike the board game the first move involves no roll of the dice. The class of players known as users always start the game on the same certain properties, owned by a small set of players known as Google, Amazon, etc. Microsoft used to have a marketing slogan to address the growing presence of the internet: "Where do you want to go today?" The question we should have is, "Why does Microsoft need to know?" Why do these companies need to know what we are going to do next? In the WWW monopoly a small set of players collect rent from nearly every user and strive to know every users' next move. It may be through the control of websites or devices, or both. As they say, the game is rigged.
How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria, China, and North Korea.
The best policy is a balance between total government control and total private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So it doesn't have to be one or the other.
The ideas of Henry George [0] address this, without resorting to "Tragedy of the Commons" solutions of collective ownership. The short answer is a Land Value Tax [1], based only on "ground rent" (the usage value combined with the value of proximity to community), as opposed to taxing improvements, as most property taxes do currently.
The rough theory is that the tax should be proportional to the unearned "rent-seeking" profits that derive indirectly from the surrounding community; moreover, a higher tax on ground rent disincentivizes pure speculation [2], while removing the disincentive of value-creation/development baked into our property taxes now. And unlike communist policies, this system would preserve the distributed intelligence of markets; there are some libertarian economists who favor the idea, the most notable of whom was Milton Friedman, who called LVT "the least worst tax".
In some sense, it could be seen as closer to a voluntarist system that most forms of government: one essentially pays the surrounding community to compensate them for their violent exclusion from a portion of nature. This video articulates the idea fairly well in plain language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yltJHY6g5I
>This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life, monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a fair shot at coming out on top!
>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly.
>Background and history
>Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world.
>The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II; this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and distributed worldwide by University Games.
>Trademark lawsuit
>See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group)
>In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name, claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly and distributing the game.[2]
>For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti."
How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life
Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a political statement protected under the First Amendment.
This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.
You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!
The Goals of the Micropoly Project:
To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the economy.
To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.
To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in 1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.
To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source" game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.
To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.
To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.
Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the Twentieth Century:
Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.
The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist. That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!
The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.
The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game all over the world.
Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other peoples original ideas.
Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with frivolous lawsuits.
They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the "Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!
As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's safe to call a game "anything-opoly".
We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.
The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and Microsoft should be obvious.
Openopoly
The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own personalized monopoly game.
We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board games and multi-player online computer games.
Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church, sports team, or favorite political cause.
Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.
If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more?
If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem will solve itself.
Prisoner's dilemma. A single wealthy person giving up their wealth will not have a large enough effect on society to actually change anything. It will only make them worse off (as they now have less wealth). From the perspective of a single person, hoarding as much wealth as possible is a local optimum.
When all wealthy people get together and divide their wealth, this enables education, housing, preventative health care, etc for poorer people in society. This will in turn lead to reduced crime, reduced homelessness, reduced illness and a much more productive society as a whole. This will then in turn generate more money for them.
This is a global optimum that will make everybody better off, including the rich, but it is not easy to achieve. It requires long-term vision, which is difficult in a world driven by quarterly reports and four year election cycles.
Assumptions are testable, e.g. using game models. Such as Monopoly.
If you want as more accurate model, you can make one, e.g. mock markets. You can even evaluate then using various programmed strategies.
The problem is if your assumptions are completely invalid. Macroeconomy tends to use a few of those, especially based on workings of debt cycle. An almost correct descriptive model which when used as proscriptive causes ruin.
Likewise pure supply-demand models fail when applied in the real world.
Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each."
Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily.
However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?
> However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation?
So basically it's ok to sacrifice the minority, as long as it benefits the majority, huh?
A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B.
I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."
> I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."
First, while some wealthy people remain wealthy, I'd guess there's a much larger impact on people who are becoming wealthy than those who are already super-rich.
Second, as you said, it's the principle. I've got an objection to seizing people's stuff to then give away to others. There is no reason government should supply anything that is not a pure public good, and it should supply precious few of those, too. Remember that every act the federal government takes is backed up with the threat of death. If you don't comply, a bunch of agents will bust down your door at 3 AM and haul you away (see the disturbing number of paramilitary groups many federal agencies now possess). If you resist, you get killed.
This applies to income tax too, by the way. I couldn't care less how much good you think you can do with it, no one gets to take someone else's stuff because he wants to give it to someone he deems more deserving.
> First, while some wealthy people remain wealthy, I'd guess there's a much larger impact on people who are becoming wealthy than those who are already super-rich.
Given that her proposed tax is for wealth over $50M, I'd guess there is not much impact at all on people who are "becoming" wealthy.
> If you don't comply, a bunch of agents will bust down your door at 3 AM and haul you away (see the disturbing number of paramilitary groups many federal agencies now possess). If you resist, you get killed.
The number of first-world multimillionaires brutally gunned down by federal agents because they underpaid their tax is indeed countless. I hear this is a real problem in Denmark.
> This applies to income tax too, by the way. I couldn't care less how much good you think you can do with it, no one gets to take someone else's stuff because he wants to give it to someone he deems more deserving.
>Given that her proposed tax is for wealth over $50M, I'd guess there is not much impact at all on people who are "becoming" wealthy.
It's the corporate taxes that hurt the most because in a globalist society those taxes are taxes their competition does not have to pay and therefore can undercut them in price in world markets.
Unfortunately, governments do indeed steal stuff all the time. That's why it needs to be as hyper-local as possible and why citizens should own military-grade arms. I think our arguments are jousting without clashing, so to speak, because I'm making a principled point rather than a pragmatic one.
Im not sure you have thought through the consequences of citizens owning military grade arms.
It (arguably) removes the government as a threat, but replaces the threat with other citizens.
It seems to me that history teaches that in the absence of a strong government, people are taxed by whoever is capable of becoming a strong local warlord.
The income that is paid to you derives it’s value from the stability of the backing gov’t. I don’t think money is as “yours” as you think it is. Gov’t is already involved whether you like it not.
It has been since we went off the gold standard, yes. However, the government has already been taxing for this service in the form of inflation (which, incidentally, is one of the more regressive taxes one could devise). All we have to do is abolish the fed and go back to the gold standard and this problem is solved.
The state backs up your right to personal property with violence too. Your stuff is only your stuff we decided it is a right and have our state enforce that right.
Well sure, stealing from others is a violation of the NAP. That's part of the "keeping the peace" duty I mentioned in my above position that the state should keep the peace, uphold property rights, and enforce contracts.
What's the NAP? In any case, we rely on the state to uphold those rights, and since we cannot expect the state to work for free, we accept a percentage is needed for the maintenance of those right.
Sorry, non-aggression principle. Basically, no using force against someone else until he does it first. You're right that we do have to have some government to uphold basic duties. However, those duties are pure public goods and should be billed as such. Sum the total expenditures each year, divide by the number of adult citizens, and directly bill each citizen that amount.
I think it should be normalized to the amount of wealth rather than pax, because a larger pile of wealth relies more on this authority to maintain it. I'd even think perhaps supralinearly so.
Calling something "radical" is a tried-and-true technique to attempt to discredit it without arguing the point. What I described isn't that far from the federal government in early America.
> The point of government is to organize society, to provide a framework for doing things which we all collectively agree need to be done, but is in nobody's selfish interest to do.
Why? How do you justify using force to coerce others toward your vision of what you believe correct?
> There is a lot of stuff that fits this category.
Such as what? Please tell me why each of these must be done by the government.
> the government doesn't just set rules and boss you around.
Some of the services you mentioned are there for good reason. I'm okay with weather and maps - the military does need to have that information (even if the military should be smaller), and once the information is collected, it's a public good and can be made available to citizens. I'd prefer stuff like forests were managed on a local level. As for emergencies, private disaster relief often does a better job: https://capitalresearch.org/article/private-sector-disaster-...
> Do you think society should be organized or not?
Talk about a false dichotomy. There are absolutely more- and less-organized societies. I've made it pretty clear that the government should keep the peace, uphold property rights, and enforce contracts.
> The notion that everything will all magically self-organize into a nice society is manifestly a myth.
Why? The above provide plenty of structure for a "nice society", for some definitions of nice. What's yours?
> I would rather live in the former Soviet Union in all its totalitarian dysfunctionality than in what libertarians imagine utopia to be like.
That's your choice, except your choice messes with my life. Mine only messes with yours to the extent that you no longer get to steal my stuff.
> If you want an example of that, try Somalia.
The Somalian government does not keep the peace. It does not uphold property rights. It does not enforce contracts.
> tl;dr libertarianism is anarchy in a business suit.
That statement is a willfully ignorant attempt to create a straw man. Democrats are communists in business suits, republicans are fascists in business suits, both of those statements are just as important. There are some anarchists, but not very many.
This seems like an easily solvable problem, frankly. Gazillionaires don't tend to want to live in the tax havens they store their gazillions in because (surprise) they tend to be shitholes. So you just tax the movement of money in and out of the country - money is pointless if you can't spend it.
The reason this isn't done isn't because it's hard, it's because the foxes are running the chicken coop.
If that's the case, then why don't we see capital always rushing to countries that have the lowest tax rates? Last I checked Japan has lots of capital investment, a large economy, a substantial wealthy class, and yet a high tax rate...
People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions.
Another way to think of it is, that by benefiting from public goods (roads, law enforcement, health regulations) already in existence you and your family have already entered into a social contract with the government, which acts as a representative of the collective will of all people towards a more perfect union, and in which payment is due for the benefits you have obtained.
> People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions.
Translation: People are stupid and need to be forced to do the right thing. (Where the "right thing" is defined by the current people in charge.)
Everybody gains from the wealth created by something like a city park, whether they contribute or not. So there's a game theoretic problem that prevents reaching the wealth maxima without public collaboration. For example you might end up with a strip mall that produces more wealth for a few people but less overall wealth for the whole community then the park because surrounding land values don't benefit as much.
If exercise leads to greater health, then why is it necessary to try to encourage people exercise? Why don't people willingly exercise so that they can be healthy?
No but we should force people to pay taxes due to the same underlying human trait. If you don't exercise you hurt mostly yourself. If you don't pay taxes you are a burden on society.
Let's say that you could somehow increase your wealth by 1% each day.
If you have $100, tomorrow you will have $101. Then $102.01. And so on and so forth. At the end of the year, you'll have $3778.34
Now let's say that if you give $50 to someone else, you can both increase your wealth by 1.1% each day. At the end, both of you will have $2711.08. Individually less, but collectively more.
That's the issue: individually less.
While you may get some benefit from the collective betterment of society, it still requires sacrificing some portion of your potential maximum wealth.
It's $146,998.73 for each person. No matter how you slice it, 1.1% is greater than 1%. We're still working with $100 initially.
And if you're talking about one person's unrealized gain, we've already addressed that.
Individually, we may make less, but collectively, we make more.
The idea is that since fortune is largely based on luck and then exploiting that luck, we could be leaving a lot of progress on the table. A landlord who makes their wealth simply by charging rent isn't really doing anything to advance anything. He just happened to own the right bit of land at the right time.
So if we tax him and then use those taxes to provide for those who did not have the same breaks, we may be enabling someone to actually create something that advances technology or science or medicine.
I mean, "individually less, collectively more" also explains why the individual doesn't want to voluntarily give up anything.
>Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail them in the real world.
>In Anti-Monopoly II individual players choose to play either by monopolist or competitor rules at the beginning of the game. This version plays more like the actual Monopoly game in that it is based on the buying and selling of real estate. Among other differences, competitors charge lower rents and can improve any property they own at any time, while monopolists must own at least two properties in a group before building houses on them and charge much higher rents.
I've never played it, and I didn't like the cheap version I found at a store recently. But sounded like an interesting experiment. The reviews/ratings on BGG are fairly negative though[1].
The trend in board games right now is legacy board games, where the game maintains state after each session. What you really want is legacy monopoly. Where the winners of early games maintain their monopoly, and face a proletariat uprising in future games, making it an asymmetrical struggle for the elites to maintain power.
> I love people who call capitalism evil while doing so on computers and phones that exist because of it, while surrounded by products, from their clothes to their desk, furniture, construction materials, cars and more that are the product of the system.
This is a bad-faith argument - you're allowed to protest a system that you are forced to participate in. Our current system does not offer any clothes, furniture, homes (all necessities!) that were not produced by it
> We have friends from nearly every real Socialist nation in the world. They can’t believe people like Sanders and Warren are not being laughed out of politics in the US.
I'm guessing most of those people, like Bloomberg, oppose the leftist regimes because they have lost something to them - all the anti-leftist posts from Venezuela/China/Cuba/etc. that I've seen were from the 0.1% of their respective countries.
What is all your point getting at? I mean don't you have already in USA public schools,roads, parks, firemen, police ?
You can have your private bodyguards if you like, your private teachers etc. Do you think say firemen should go and only stop fire if you have insurance and if you are poor you should just burn? If not then why should a poor person have no health care , a rich dude can pay for private hospitals and doctors anyway.
> don't you have already in USA public schools,roads, parks, firemen, police
Sure. That has nothing to do with Socialism. There's nothing wrong with paying reasonable taxes to build and support an infrastructure that is of benefit to all involved.
The healthcare problem in the US is grotesquely misunderstood. It has NOTHING to do with insurance (private and otherwise) and everything to do with stuff politicians have done to us over the years.
Look, I work in aerospace. If I don't analyze things down to the real root causes of failures things go boom or worse, people die. And so I tend to look at problems with this perspective.
If you analyze the healthcare problem in the US to identify root causes the last thing you are going to have on your list (if at all) is insurance. It is as irrelevant as can be.
What's on the list?
I'll list three, in no particular order of importance:
- Government involvement in student loans
- Tort reform
- Federal and State regulatory burden
The US government is involved in guaranteeing student loans, which creates a situation where universities can charge insane amounts of money for their product. Even worse, universities make these loans accessible to kids without consideration to what it will mean for their lives and society in general.
If a doctor graduates with a nice new degree and $300K or more in debt, he or she is not going to be able to work for what I will term a "reasonable wage". Starting life with that much debt pretty locks people in to having to charge large amounts of money for their time and services.
No imagine an operating room where each person has student debt in the range of $300K and more. That surgery, I don't care what it is, is going to be very expensive. Add to that the debt every single person in that hospital has to face and you'll get the picture.
At a first level of inspection, the involvement of government in student loans has created a situation where the cost of medical care has increased to ridiculous levels over time.
The solution isn't to spend unobtainable amounts of money to offer free education. The solution is for government to get out of that business and allow the free market to force universities to compete.
If a doctor graduates with $100K or less in debt they, in theory, medical care costs would drop by 66%. They would be able to have a similar standard of living and charge 2/3 less for their services at the same time. That is a HUGE improvement all by itself.
Tort reform is another huge issue. This one affects the entire chain of participants in the healthcare industry. In the US you can sue anyone and everyone for anything that might happen in the course of receiving medical care. In fact, if, as an example, there's problem with care and a lawsuit is filed, they will sue everyone from the doctor to the hospital, equipment providers, suppliers, etc. They will go as far and wide as they can.
This means everyone in the chain has to have very expensive insurance to protect themselves. I know doctors who pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for this kind of insurance. My wife is a doctor, so we get to experience these realities first hand.
Once again, this imposes minimum costs that have to be covered by what you charge for your services. And the cost is high. Not just in terms of what you have to charge but what you have to do.
It is very common for US doctors to run a bunch of unnecessary tests. One of the fears is that if you don't and, for whatever reasons, a lawsuit is filed, you could be exposed to career-ending liability because you did not run the patient through every possible test in the universe.
These things increase the cost of healthcare by an unknowable factor. Let's just say it is not insignificant. If we fixed this problem healthcare costs would come down. Drug companies are exposed to multi-billion dollar liability. Again, someone has to pay for these costs, and that someone are the patients.
Finally, regulatory burden. I wanted to develop a simple medical device to help people with what's known as "Single Side Deafness" SSD. This is a case where a person can only hear from one side and is deaf on the opposite side. From a technical perspective, giving them the ability to hear something from the deaf side is easy: microphone on one side, earpiece in the other ear, bring some of the sound across, done.
Well, I very quickly discovered that the cost to get such a device through regulatory testing and approvals was very easily in the tens of millions of dollars, if not a hundred million+. This is why hearing aids cost thousands of dollars and other medical supplies and equipment can be so expensive. Drug makers spend billions of dollars on the regulatory burden.
Once again, these costs have to be paid by someone, that that someone are the patients.
Nobody is proposing we eliminate all regulation but, if we truly care about universally available healthcare we have to look for ways to make these costs a rounding error rather than something that has an entrepreneur like me say "forget it, I'd rather put my money in to making websites people click for money". That's just reality my friend.
And so, if you read all of this, got here and stop to think a bit, you should come to the conclusion that insurance isn't on that list because it likely does not belong there, at least not as a major cost driver. It is almost irrelevant. Address the above three (and there are more, of course) and the cost of healthcare in the US (as well as private insurance) will absolutely plummet.
The people pushing stuff like "Medicare for all" are pushing a fantasy not rooted in reality and one that has truly evil side effects (read my other answer on the subject). They push this fantasy because the lie is far easier to sell than speaking about the truth and the hard work we have to do in order to solve the problems I listed here as well as other issues.
A politician's objective is to gain votes, not to solve problem. In order to do that they have to win a beauty contest, not an intellectually sound argument. They use every trick in the book they lie, they misrepresent and they propose crazy stuff that no informed voter would ever support. And they do this because they know that the vast majority of voters operate at a basal level and virtually none of them are going to engage in this kind of analysis or the thought require in order to understand if what they are saying aligns with any objective reality.
I hope you got this far and actually stop to think. Don't attack the messenger, address the argument. What I said above is based on root cause analysis of the US healthcare system and it is as near to irrefutable as I can get given the resources available to me.
1 why not get the top say 10000 smartest people that want to study medicine and offer them free education. If some rich person is not in the top he can pay. Why would you prefer to lose some smart but poor people.
I understand that the system is super complex and if you clean it up you would probably don't need to pay more insurance or taxes though I seen there is a lot of FUD that an European like system would cost people more then already pay (I am not sure if you are in this camp)
Do you think something like Canada, UK or other countries have are not american enough for USA?
These are fair questions and I don't have real answers, just opinion based on having a good deal of exposure to other cultures and systems.
I believe one of the misconceptions in the US is that free university in other countries means anyone gets in. That is simply not the case. A very simple example I have of this is the daughter of one of our close friends who wants to study medicine in Spain. She has been preparing for a full year to take entrance exams in order to be accepted into the university. Her parents are paying for her preparation to pass these exams. Even if preparation was free, the acceptance rate will be based on how many seats are available and some weighing of results.
This means that only a certain type of student (notice I did not say class) will have access to university education, even if it is free. I get the sense some Americans think that making university free means everyone has an equal probability of obtaining a PhD. This is a fantasy. Universities can only accept a certain number of students per year and they have to filter from the total candidate population in order to reduce it down to what they are able to handle.
It is hard to argue against the potential value of free education except to point out that, at a first level, if unworthy students are accepted at the exclusion of good students we would be wasting money and valuable resources. If we are going to give someone the gift of a valuable education they have to demonstrate they are ready for it and that the probability of success is reasonable.
This, in the US, would setup yet another inequality problem. It is easy to see that kids from more challenging environments are not going to do well if they have to pass tests in order to enter Harvard or MIT when it is free. Do you exclude really good students to accept those who are almost guaranteed to fail? Why is it OK to discriminate against kids who are excellent students? Why is it not OK to tell less capable students to spend a year or two at an (also free) preparatory college and then take the entrance exam again. In other words, don't degrade standards for some misplaced social ideology. If we want to graduate excellent doctors, let's do exactly that through a process that ensures it.
And then there's the problem of how to pay for all of that. Universities and colleges in the US currently exist under a system where students are paying anywhere from, say, $20K to $60K per year --if not more-- for their education. That means that, as a business, as an organization, their financial model is entirely based on the various revenue generators available to them, one of which is tuition. This financial model cannot be supported if tuition disappears. There is no way we can pay for that structure through taxation, even if we take all the money from all the billionaires in the nations (which is another massive lie these politicians are telling).
To this point, one of the other things Amercian voters without exposure to other parts of the worlds don't understand is that universities in other nations are not as rich as those in the US. Professors don't get paid nearly as much in free-education nations as they do in the US. I mean, in the US salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year --even millions-- are a very real occurrence.
Outliers? Sure, but the reality of the matter is that free-university professors, in the US or elsewhere, simply can't make as much. The equation very quickly becomes mathematically unsustainable. However, it does not end there, there's staff and an organization behind each professor and class and those have budgets too. Simple put, if less money comes in you have to either close down or spend less.
As you noted, things are far more complex than they always seem on the surface. We can't have free education for all without addressing costs. There is no way we are going to pay a professor hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions if taxpayers are paying the bill and everything is free. At some point things have to be fair and reasonable.
Simple example, my son is at a university studying robotics. They have a two million dollar humanoid robot in one of the labs. They also have equipment and other robots costing many, many millions of dollars. These costs have to be paid somehow and by someone. My guess is that, today, that's a combination of tuition and donations. If we make tuition free, the need for cash can only be reduced by lowering professor salaries, reducing the size and breath of the organization and controlling the other costs (no million dollar humanoid). This is a reality at universities all over the world, they can't afford to be government-funded and have the same kinds of extravagant things we often see at universities in the US.
Can it be done? Sure, of course. Be we should not lie about how we would do it, and this should include a conversation about how our universities would change, how salaries would change and how access to technology and resources would change.
Yet another level of detail: What does "free" mean. In Europe and Latin America you might have free university but the cost of books and the cost of living somewhere and all of your personal costs are still yours. In the US, unlike in other parts of the world, kids leave their parents home and go to university all over the nation. In other countries is is very common for kids to go to local universities and stay home. Well, if our universities are free, who is going to pay for a kid from Las Vegas to travel to Boston and live there while attending free Harvard? That is still a significant amount of money. And that should not be a part of "free".
All of this means that, even if we make university tuition free you are going to have to filter kids based on academic performance --creating a social inequality battle-- and you are not going to pay for them living at some far away city at all. Again, things are always far more complex than they might seem on first inspection.
I don't know what the solutions might be. My gut feeling is that, in the US, the first step is to get government out of the business of financing university education. That will force universities to compete, control costs and become more efficient (financially speaking). If we do that, tuition will come down and might become very affordable. This could resolve the problem to a satisfactory level as a first experiment. Allow a natural reduction of cost through competition. Ten years later, come back and consider the idea of funding the more efficient versions of our universities to cover, say, half of the tuition. Another ten years and we cover it all and university is free. I would much prefer to see a gradual, logical and careful process towards better and cheaper education than some mathematically impossible attempt that is far more likely to cause a disaster than to fix anything.
I agree that you need to find a way to bring the costs down, I think that a lot of money are wasted, For example in Mathematics or computer science you don't need super expensive equipment, you need good professors that are good at teaching.
Some universities have buildings with cheap bedrooms for students, places with cheap but good cooked food.
What I think it happened in US is the capitalistic thing where you raise the prices until people stop buying so the final price is not the costs + some profit on top but just the maximum money you could force out from your customers , you could say that maybe true free markets can solve this but for medicine you can't have 1000 universities competing because this domain is not like math or computers, you need access to hospitals to train your students.
In the US the government guarantees student loans. This means the universities have exactly zero risk. When someone has no risk of losing money because they government will guarantee payment, they will charge and lend any amount to anyone. You can't lose.
What would happen if the government got out of student loans and did not guarantee them?
Universities would experience significantly more risk than before. And, in fact, there is no way they could charge the exorbitant amounts they charge today. They would be forced to reduce costs in order to be able to reduce tuition and, as a result, reduce the risk they undertake.
I know a kid who is going for a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and will graduate with a debt of over $300K. He was a member of the robotics team I mentor. I strongly suggested it was a terrible idea to start life with an ME degree and that much debt. It amounts to economic slavery. Well, the university, didn't care because the government guarantees the loan. So, they lured the kid in by promising all kinds of wonderful things. Sadly, in a couple of years this person is going to start to understand why I advised against taking that path.
From my perspective, the largest problem with regards to the cost of education in the US is that government disrupts free market forces. All they have to do is stop and the cost of education in the US will drop over time. Nobody in their right mind would loan $300K to an 18 year old without market distorting forces such as a 100% government guarantee.
But if the government stops tomorrow to get involved won't you get a giant backlash? I do not see that universities would stop spending and reduce the costs by 90%, if those universities are also in debt because they planned on the money they won't get you could get them bankrupt. Do you have a solution for this ?
Btw I appreciate you taking time to provide this comments.
It's a complex problem and, yes, you are correct, you can't just stop overnight. I won't claim to know exactly how to execute the removal of government from the equation.
Perhaps it starts with an announcement of a reduction of guarantees over a period of time. For example, US $40K maximum and it goes down by $5K every year until reaching zero. That would provide for a gradual reduction and a transition from a "we can't lose because the government guarantees it" mentality to universities being forced to exist in the real world.
I say "exist in the real world" because it is easy to forget that lots of people leave university with very expensive yet useless degrees. It's easy in a place like HN to think of STEM degrees. There are lots of other degrees universities get paid lots of money to deliver that do not have the earning potential of STEM degrees. Again, because government guarantees the loans universities are able to charge silly amounts for these degrees.
Not a simple problem, but I think we know that distorting the market through government involvement isn't helping anyone.
Could be there a big risk that some private companies would popup and offer students the money as lending or in exchange for a few ears of your career? Then the costs will not go down.
I would suggest a controversial thing, the government decides the maximum and enforces it, it also decides that for each subject the universities would accept a number of students for free, for the free sports there will be an exam . Who would pay for the free spots? The universities and the government will have to decide on how to split this.
With my solution I am trying to solve a possible tragedy, brilliant students that can't become doctors and engineers and have to get other jobs or are forced to work instead of study so it affects their performance, as a society we should try to identify the briliant people and help them because they will help our children in the future.
I have to keep coming back to the idea that the problem is complex and the root of it is interference with free market forces.
The other notable aspect of government guaranteed student loans is that they cannot be discharged (eliminated) through bankruptcy.
If someone ends-up with too much debt they simply can't repay society allows both people and businesses to file for bankruptcy in a few different forms. One of them provides for restructuring the debt in order to make it affordable enough to pay. The other erases all debt in order to allow someone to start over (in the case of a business it would shut down).
Credit cards, consumer loans, car loans, home loans, they can all be erased through bankruptcy. Student loans? No. They cannot. You are stuck with them for the rest of your life.
Let me give you a plausible scenario. Someone goes into medical school and, a few years into it, has a serious accident and can't continue. They never graduate. Let's assume at that point in their studies they have accumulated $200K in debt. Well, they have to pay for that. And they cannot eliminate it through bankruptcy. They are not doctors and can't earn an above-average wage, and yet they are slaves to their nice fat government-guaranteed, government-distorted loans.
Universities are guaranteed their money because the government guarantees the loans and the government makes sure you will pay until you die if that's what it takes.
In your scenario, if the government provided no guarantees and private lenders offered loans, they would not loan exorbitant amounts. Their loans, as is the case with any consumer loan, would be subject to discharge (elimination) through bankruptcy. Lenders would not take such risks without a tremendous amount of assurances as well as vetting of the candidate. There would be tremendous downwards pressure on tuition simply because lenders would not be open to providing $50K to $60K per year for most degrees, if any.
From my perspective no degree should cost more than what someone WITH THAT DEGREE can pay in, say, ten years. In other words, a software engineering degree would cost more than a history degree, because the earning potential of the student would be greater in the first case.
Another way to perhaps do it is for universities to take 10% of someone's salary per year for, say, ten years. That's it, that's their payment. The logistics would need to be worked out, but, in essence, universities would have to compete in the open market by graduating highly qualified professionals.
And yet the problem continues to be the same: Universities can only accept so many people. This is true everywhere in the world, where free universities filter people through extensive entrance examinations. Forcing education to be free isn't necessarily going to solve any problems in terms of making education available to more people. Not unless you now start over-populating universities because they are "free".
Here "free" is in quotes because the concept is vacuous. There is no such thing as free. Someone always has to pay for it, if anything for the simple matter that university employees and professors have to earn a living and it cost money to run the schools.
Every single "free" government run program in the world runs into exactly the same problem: Quality deteriorates as the amount of money available per economic unit goes down. The easiest example of this are "free" healthcare systems, where care is limited, people have to wait a very long time to be seen, quality of care and testing is substandard and their very existence depends on drugs and product developed in non-free systems (places like the US).
If universities in the US become "free", the question is: Who pays? The government? So, each university is allocated an amount of money per student? We are back to tuition, this time paid by government. Well, then, how much do we pay? Do we pay MIT the same as a local university? No? Why? Why is it fair that universities are not paid the same per student? If a local university gets $10K per year, MIT should also get $10K per year. It would not be highly discriminatory to give MIT $50K per year and a local university $10K.
You see, as we start to dive into the realities of these not-so-brilliant ideas we run into myriad problems. Everything sounds fantastic in front of a microphone during a political speech. And yet, reality tends to be nowhere near to what is being promised. It never is.
I stopped reading at "socialist utopia Bernie Sanders is selling". It's too much for my poor European point of view, using my capitalist Chinese phone to read your comment and write my answer.
East and West Germany. If that doesn't expose the horror that socialism can bring to a population I don't know how else to explain it.
If one were to make a list of all of the advances in humanity across a range of fields of study, one would be very hard pressed to match the accomplishments of capitalism-rooted systems with what came out of the entire human history of socialist-based systems. One list is a thousand kilometers long and the other, by comparison, a post-it note. I truly don't understand how anyone can defend such ideology given the overwhelming evidence against it.
The countries usually held-up as examples of "good" socialism are not socialist nations at all. The way I would characterize them is that they are capitalist nations with good to excellent social programs. And, guess, what, there's nothing wrong with that at all. But let's not call them socialism, because they are not. Socialism leads to horror and suffering. Norway, as an example, is not a socialist nation. Even better, they could not have the programs they enjoy were it not for the oil industry they intelligently use to fund aspects of their society.
Bernie and company love to grab examples like Denmark and pretend they apply one-to-one to the US. We are not Denmark and Denmark is not the US. You can't do that. You can't point at the educational system in Finland and propose we do the same in the US, it won't work. We are different, the cultures are different, it's a different reality.
The simplest examples of this is what happened in Japan during Fukushima and today in China with COVID-19. If a disaster like Fukushima or Wuhan happened in the US you would, more than likely, have looting and all kinds of criminal activity by people taking advantage of the situation. That is a cultural difference that is almost insurmountable. And so, if someone proposed bringing Japanese style policing into the US because "look at how well Fukushima worked out" they would be, well, insane, completely disconnected from reality.
That is what Sanders and company are doing with Socialism and when they compare the US to other nations. We are not the same. We are better at a few things and worse at others. We can always improve, but let's not pretend there's some magical pill that will make everything better instantly, that's not real.
I think you're grossly over simplifying "the system" that created all of those things. We don't live in either a "capitalist" or "socialist" system. It's a blend. If you read Adam Smith and Karl Marx you'll see we have many elements of both.
In the large, it's extremely unclear that everything you've named is a side-effect of capitalism or other effects (such as network effects; hard to predict whether a critical mass of invention in any one location would kick off the kind of technology revolution that has occurred regardless of the form of government atop it).
Monopoly sucks because of using the house rule that Free Parking is a jackpot of money. Not doing property auctions and paying out $400 for landing on Go are lesser reasons for it sucking. Stick to the published rules and the problems mostly to away.
That house rule (which is far from universally applied) is a small detail. The game is boring (luck-based, little if any strategy) and unenjoyable in other ways: it takes too long to finish, players who go bust early are left watching the game continue for maybe hours, front-runners are almost certainly going to win yet it takes an excruciatingly drawn-out process to finish the process, etc.
I have a better house rule. Properties don't have prices and when anyone lands on an unowned property it goes up for auction. Reflects more of a realistic property market and makes the game far more strategic. We also find the property prices in monopoly are too low by at least 2x.
There's a lot of strategy in Monopoly. People who don't think there's strategy in Monopoly in my experience are people who don't understand the value of trading, and have largely played games of it where little to no trading was done.
If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give that player a Monopoly, you haven't exhausted the strategy space of Monopoly, a seminal game in the history of board games that all 3M/German/Euro-style strategy games of today owe a debt to.
I'm going to stop because I feel like I'm falling into a bizarre habit of only commenting on HN when Monopoly is brought up negatively:)
edit: if there's an obvious, unstoppable winner at any point in any game, you are allowed to stop playing.
>If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give that player a Monopoly
No, I wouldn't, except if it gives a (more valuable) monopoly to me.
You talk a lot about strategy, but what strategy is that? Afaict any strategy in Monopoly is "static", i.e. prefer orange properties, then the second set in each street, etc. That is, the boring sort x)
The game should run between. 30-60 minutes at the most with normal rules and if everyone knows what's up. Once the first player falls an auction begins or one player gets all the assets and the game is quickly over after that. Most games go on forever because there's money on free parking or you don't do auctions, or you have unlimited houses.
Play by the rules and the game is very fun with a lot of strategies.
If you follow the actual rules, the game rarely lasts more than an hour. The main rule that no one follows that speeds up the game is auctioning a property when there person doesn't want to buy it.
It forces every property on the board to be owned with just a few times around the board.
Everytime I played, people always bought properties if able, since it's so obviously worth it, so auctions (which where in the rules) happened very seldom anyways.
They are so not all worth it. A couple efficient properties (yellow and orange) are worth any number of the others. Own a monopoly on yellow or orange, and you will likely win the game. I auction everything else, which depletes my competitors and raises my chances.
It's still mostly luck (and who-has-the-most-social-capital-to-persuade-the-other-to-let-them-win) based though. There are lot's of much better board games out there.
Poker is mostly luck. Elite players sometimes lose for months at a time. It takes a LOT of hands before you can expect your real world results to converge to your EV results. It is certainly possible to win in the long term, but results from a single session are very loosely correlated with skill.
Any individual session of poker is mostly luck. I say this as a winning poker player. The edges are very small and the variance is quite high. There is a reason it's so rare for the best players to make deep runs in the WSOP Main Event.
Yep. When we first started playing by the published rules, we were surprised by how quickly games ended. Property auctions help too as it quickly gets most properties into play instead of players just going round and round the board while hitting NOP spaces.
This is not due to its origin. It's just not a great game due to its widely varied play time, elimination of players and other flaws.
If you're new to Euro-style games and enjoy games with some luck and rolling of the dice, check out The Settlers of Catan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan).
Not every game has a message. Settlers of Catan was created to show what a fun, tight boardgame with some depth and a limited playing time would look like, and kicked off the German boardgame boom as a result.
But if you want a game showing the evils of international politics, give War On Terror a try. You can fight the other players by funding terrorists to fight them, but if everybody does that, the terrorists win and everybody loses.
They're fine if they're short. I'd prefer elimination to longer games where a couple clear leaders after lucky first couple rounds are the only ones who can plausibly win, which I've also seen in a few enlightened modern games. Best case for those games is you spend the remaining 80-90% of the game playing spoiler or kingmaker, which is kinda shitty, or in the worst case the game's designed such that you can't do much about it, so you're going through the motions to see if you can manage 3rd place out of 5 (or whatever) for the rest of the game.
Monopoly's pretty short if you play by the rules and everyone knows how to play and isn't screwing around. I don't really like it, but I don't think elimination is the main problem. It's not like world-conquest risk where it typically drags on forever, well after the first player elimination.
[EDIT] economy-building games with low interaction between players and a significant randomness component seem especially prone to "well that player happened to go first and got the only good thing available to buy this round so has its benefit the rest of the game, and will proceed to stomp everyone else, obviously". There's a particular cards-based game with an age-of-sail trading vessel theme I've played several times that's my (least) favorite example of this: I've won, I've lost, both are fucking boring because you spend most of the game knowing where you're going to place and you can't even rage-harm other players out of boredom. Drawing a blank on the name. Anyway, I'd much rather be eliminated in a game like that.
"Dead man walking" is one of the worst feelings ever.
Settlers of Catan has a few "dead man walking" situations, but they're somewhat rare.... Especially because the optimal strategy in Catan is to trade with players weaker than you. So all "dead men walking" get boosted by the stronger players. The 1st place player never wants to trade with the 2nd place player, or vice versa.
"Ticket to Ride" has more dead-man walking situations, where you know you've messed up but nothing can be done until the game is over. And because the game is elimination free, you feel like a jerk to leave before the game is over.
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The goal is to find a game that strikes the balance. Keep everyone playing, but make everyone feel like their contributions (even if they're behind) are noteworthy.
The optimal strategy is to trade with players weaker than you who have something worth trading.
I've had many games where the "dead man walking" comes into effect because a player generates too few resources or not in demand resources (usually by bad initial placement) and therefore is only useful to squeeze for the occasional resource. They can't engage in constant trades because they literally have nothing, potentially not even as a space blocker. So optimal strategy becomes mostly ignore them except for kingmaker.
I'm assuming decent initial placement (EVERYONE gets a pick at one of the 4-best spots in the game, and the player who get's 4th pick gets 4th AND 5th pick). Everyone has at least one good pick in my experience.
The situation where you have a clear "dead man walking", even when you did everything correctly, is when opposing players block you in with roads, preventing your expansion.
Once one of your initial 2 villages are blocked, the 2nd village becomes a target for blockage, because everyone knows that blocking your 2nd village will effectively eliminate you from the game.
Not "really eliminate", you're still a player and are kinda forced to play. But you can't make a 3rd village, and basically have no pathway to victory. A few unlucky rolls, or an opponent's lucky "Road Building" card, can bring up the road-block strategy extremely quickly.
Catan can get pretty uninteresting due to dice variance. I've had games where two players made lots of resources on 9 and two players made lots of resources on 5. Five got rolled 14 times and 9 got rolled 3 times. Even with good spots if the dice are against you it can easily become a lot of do nothing while other people play the game.
A lot of people also play with the houserule no trading because there is too much kingmaking in trading. It's too easy to place aggressively for ore if you know you can trade for whatever you're missing of the settlement. If you have to 4:1 it's a bit more of a tradeoff.
Wait, no trading??? That seems to remove the only interesting aspect of the game!
Otherwise you're all sitting around a board that randomly generates resources for you to spend and sorta get in each other's way with road and settlement placements. If you want semi-solo Euro games, play something with way less dice variance!
The trades and dynamic that arises from the mechanic are pretty much the only reason to play imo. Otherwise the dice mechanics are way too strong as you point out.
When we played Catan every single day for a year during the 1990s, we ran into the dice variance issue plenty of time that we considered creating a bag with 36 chits with the dice distribution, guaranteeing that all dice results would come up in the expected ratios. Or maybe 72 chits to remove the predictability when the bag starts to get empty, and return the chits once you got a complete set of 36 out.
But as you can see, the idea quickly became way too complicated and we never implemented it.
Removing trading sounds like a terrible idea. Being able to monopolise a resource just to trade it for what you really need, is a feature, not a bug. Some resources are rare, and you need to take that into account during placement.
+1. I once did a fun presentation on why Monopoly sucks. This was the top issue and the main reason why I don't play it anymore.
People play games to have fun. Eliminating them from a game is the worst thing you can do as a game designer, because its the only guaranteed way of them not having fun. This is the same issue that Mafia/Werewolf suffers from.
There's a nice blog post from the designer of Guillotine[1], where he mentions how one of the cards in the game (which stops players from playing any action cards) was "the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life".
Can't find the presentation anymore, but the other issues in Monopoly:
- Runaway leader (leading players get luckier)
- Starting few rolls can end up deciding too much of the game.
- Chances of landing in various properties is skewed enough to be a game-breaker (Primarily Transports and Orange) if not everyone is aware of it.
From a social fun aspect, that's a good way to look at it. From the Landlord's Game/Monopoly original intent, eliminating a player basically means they are homeless and destitute, making the educational point rather clear. That said, cooperative games are a nicer way to spend an evening with friends.
2. Implicit alliances are setup similar to the stock market. If the "Saxon" company does better, ALL players who own Saxon benefit.
3. Implicit rivalries are setup similar to the stock market. If "Saxon" company is the strongest in the game, the players you have to worry about are the fellow "Saxon" shareholders. Especially the intense fight over who is majority shareholder (and therefore gets the majority bonus at endgame)
4. It is easier to screw opponents over by buying the last share (or holding tiles they need), rather than win the game outright. Implicitly, Acquire relies upon playing well in a social aspect. Generally speaking, scratch the back of weaker players (ex: If a weaker player a minority shareholder in "Worldwide" company, grant them the majority), they might return the favor (ex: the weaker play may make an acquisition play, benefiting all shareholders of "Worldwide". Its better to be minority in "Worldwide" through an acquisition than to be majority in Worldwide but the company doesn't go anywhere).
Note: All companies only have 25 shares. Once the 25 shares are sold, there are no more. You can only purchase 3 shares per turn (maximum, across all companies), meaning the fight for "majority shareholder" is quite intense. You can win vs players with more money by being the first one to buy 13 shares, as an example.
5. You can't sell until a company is acquired. Reaching monopoly status (11-tiles large) means that a company CANNOT be acquired, which means your wealth is now trapped in the monopoly, unable to influence other companies aside from acquiring them. The wealth counts for endgame of course, but small companies grow faster, so its usually better to leave your wealth in the small 1 to 3-tile companies instead. I have lost games because my wealth was trapped in monopolies before, despite being majority shareholder in the largest endgame companies.
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Whenever my friends want to play Monopoly, I show them Acquire instead. Its strictly superior. Better tactics, better social interactions, better interactivity for "losing" players (they stay in the game, and often make the final acquisition plays that determine the winner).
"Comeback victories" aren't really a thing, due to the exponential growth of money in acquire. If you fall behind, you fall behind exponentially. But its still nice that everyone still has something to do at the board throughout the game, especially compared to Monopoly. At a minimum, your tiles determine who you can help or hurt, while your shares you own form your rivalries and alliances. You're never "alone" per se, someone else always tries to become at least "minority" shareholder in those other companies with you. So you can rely upon your alliances to advance in the late stages of the game, even if you're behind.
There's still a degree in fun trying to maximize your earnings, even in a losing position IMO.
But Chess is OK because game ends when one player is eliminated. Therefore, no lingering players eliminated and standing on the sidelines while the rest play.
In many board games, either a win condition is reached for one player that ends the game for everyone at once, or some sort of scoring system is used to determine the winner after the gameplay ends.
An issue with games like Pandemic is that a more experienced or dominant player can tend to take charge of the whole team, with everyone else following their orders instead of autonomously making their own decisions. Especially if following the experienced player's advice really does maximize the chance of winning, it basically becomes a single-player game with spectators who help move the pieces around.
I think adding in secret information or hidden objectives can help prevent this.
The fancier term for this is "The Quarterback" problem.
It happens at every Pandemic game, but there are ways around it. Even something as simple as a total-game-timer helps. Another rule that helps is enforcing the "consent" part of the rules (for 2-player interactions, including the one where you're allowed to move other players), and ensuring autonomy is respected in the game, even if its a sub-optimal move.
+1 to secret information/hidden objectives. I guess Pandemic:Legacy uses that?
Alternatively, hidden traitor (Shadows over Camelot, Dead of Winter, Battlestar Galactica)! Then you can't trust the "Quarterback" because they could be LYING!!!
Other games solve this via real-time constraints. Thinking Escape from the Cursed Temple and Space Alert. There's not enough time for on person to coordinate everyone, so everyone needs to communicate and take initiative.
1) One or more game-ending game states which may or may not also be win conditions for the person causing them, without any possibility for a player to be "out" before that.
2) Set duration (usually in rounds played).
Usually wins determined, in either case, either by "you were the first to do X so you win" or a scored resolution.
It's usually possible to be de facto eliminated in these games (anyone who's played much Catan has been there, to pick a familiar example) but the best of them keep that from happening until late in the game. Quite a few, frankly, do not do a good job of that but do make it hard to tell who's winning so at least you don't know you've effectively already lost by the halfway point of the game.
[EDIT] for an easy example many might be familiar with: look at most trick-taking card games, like Spades, Hearts, or Bridge. No elimination (unlike, say, poker), but you still get a winner or winning partnership at the end.
"Dominion", "Settlers of Catan", "Splendor" are great games of this nature.
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Acquire has "When all companies are monopolies (11 tiles or larger) or when one company is of size 42, the game is over". So the game is on an implicit clock.
Settlers of Catan is a deeply flawed game. It's far better than monopoly but is definitely too dice-heavy and kingmaker oriented. Dominion is in a lot of ways among the worst games in the genre it created as most of the variants that followed added more interesting mechanics and tradeoffs. It should get a lot of credit for being original so I guess I'm fine with calling it a great game. Splendor is a classic.
I honestly haven't seen any pure deckbuilding game that's as good as Dominion. It works very well in Quest for El Dorado, but that's not pure deckbuilding (great game, though).
I also disagree that Catan is deeply flawed. Of course no game is perfect, but Catan does what it does very well. Kingmaking can be an issue in any multiplayer game with any sort of interaction, but in Catan, it's pretty clear how to get points. If people are throwing the game just to spite someone, then you just need to play with better people. Dice are absolutely central to the game, but that's not necessarily bad. Luck being a factor does not make a game deeply flawed. If you prefer chess, you just need to play chess instead.
I feel like there are better games than Catan these days, but it was great when people were only thinking about relatively bad games like Monopoly or Risk as their Friday night hangout game.
Agree with that. I just think it's sad that the state of the art for gaming in non-specialist stores is Catan and Ticket to Ride. If places like Indigo were a bit more ambitious in their title selection many people would be playing much better games.
I've enjoyed adding more rules, such as the bank adding loans with interest, bank robberies, insurance and organised crime and other things to make it more like a role play game.
Monopoly was meant to show the benefits of Georgism - essentially a flat-value land tax. Georgism is not opposed to capitalism. In fact, Adam Smith himself advocated a similar tax. So did Keynes, Friedman- nearly every economist.
However, it is likely that Elizabeth Magie herself didn't quite understand this - the Georgist set of rules in the Landlord's game doesn't quite match what Henry George was proposing. George's proposed tax intended to drive down rents by encouraging development of land. But the game flat out handed people money and kept rents the same.
> In fact, Adam Smith himself advocated a similar tax. So did Keynes, Friedman...
OK.
> ... nearly every economist.
Hogwash. Far from "nearly every" economist. Reciting 3 names doesn't get you anywhere close.
Before I believed "nearly every", I'd want to see a poll of a wide sample of professional and/or academic economists, showing 60+ percent support. I'm pretty sure you can't produce any such data...
Henry George was more or less opposed to our current conception of capitalism. He believed all land and narual resources should be held in common. He stated that a person should be entitled to the product of their personal labor and that was about it.
But being a practical man he realized the horse was well out of the barn on private ownership of land and felt that a land value tax was essentially the next best thing. He maintained collective ownership of natural resource beside land though.
I feel that is an overzealous interpretation. The whole crux of his work was that rent was unlike capital and labor and very subject to exploitation. He very much believed in markets and accumulation of capital. You can collectively own natural resources and still have a vibrant free trade economy.
Yup, never said he was opposed to markets nor accumulation of capital. But capitalism as we know it is hugely influenced by our current system of private property. Georgeism would have many similarities to our present form of capitalism but it would also look very different.
I guess I don't see how it would look that different. A flat value tax on land seems less radical than a wealth tax (for example). But no one sells a wealth tax as an end to capitalism.
You can't see how land becoming a liability rather than an asset because of the significant tax burden it would bear might have drastic effects on modern Western capitalism? Nor how the collective ownership of resources produced from mines, forests, rivers and oceans would significantly change it?
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"Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.
Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904 patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.
Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules, in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"