Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)
bbc.com
bbc.com
"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?)"
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.
>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.
Most countries hurt because investors avoid them.
> buying up
Meaning tons of money and investment is flowing into the country.
No limit has been found, and certainly there's none in sight. Previous things running out:
1. rand out of wood for fuel. Now we use other fuels.
2. ran out of whales for whale oil. Now using other fuels.
3. Germany ran out of oil in WW2. They switched to alcohol and were developing other synthetic fuels.
4. The US ran out of rubber in WW2, developed synthetic rubber.
5. Ran out of farmland. Now use much more productive farming techniques. Vertical hydroponic farms are an emerging technology.
And so on. Interestingly, the countries that fail to adapt to change are socialist ones. The free market countries adapt.
The sky is the limit. Or is it? When prices rise high enough everything gets possible.
Are you seriously concerned about running out of places to put a 10 story building? People will just start making 20 story buildings.
Sure you can. Other planets, moons, habitats... It's just expensive. And the prices are not nearly high enough to justify the investments.
Sounds pretty much like the housing market where I live.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That is 300x more than a zero sum model would predict.
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.
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?
You are pinning your argument on houses in _TEXAS_ having gotten smaller? lol bc if anything they have gotten larger.
most urbanites of today don't own a chicken, let alone a cow, in 800's standard they're worse off than serfs.
Today, the average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7
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.
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
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.
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.
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"
I literally see Embark trucks going down the I-70 mountain in the snow. They are already here.
Here says they are already making deliveries (albeit test ones): https://www.wired.com/story/embark-self-driving-truck-delive...
> 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"
> https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm
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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
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.
Not at all. Putting a 10 story building on a lot is multiplying the area by 10.
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.
Its kind of ridiculous. how little control states have over the land within their own boarders.
In fact, the money owned by players inflates as the game goes on.
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.
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).
There are many random factors that can cause your business to succeed or fail.
You might have a terrible business idea that would normally fail, but a coincidental event could cause your business to become wildly successful.
You could be a terrible businessperson, but by luck of birth your family has connections that allow your business to succeed through pure nepotism.
You might have a brilliant idea that fails because of a natural disaster, or because someone doesn't like you and decides to bury you in lawsuits.
You might have a brilliant business idea but a competitor springs up and poaches your labor pool.
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.
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.
The people you'd be selling to.
Not at all. I can start a business tomorrow, and if I do nothing or do stupid things with it, the odds of success are zero.
> only so many natural resources
We've literally only scratched the surface. Also, they aren't consumed. Things can always be refined and repurposed, as long as energy is available.
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.
Zero-sum games are not limited to two player games.
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.
http://landlordsgame.info/rules/lg-1904p_patent.html
However:
> 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).
http://landlordsgame.info/games/lg-1906/lg-1906_egc-rules.ht...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
> 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.
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/secret-...
[edit: here are the combined rules with rules for "prosperity" https://landlordsgame.info/games/lgp-1932/lgp-1932_rules.htm... ]
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.
If your health is so bad that you die, that's insurmountable.
If regulations are so rigid that the government forbids you to open your business, that's insurmountable.
If a corporation sets up shop next door and sells everything you sell at half the price, that's insurmountable.
Then also milder combinations of all of the above can be insurmountable.
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."
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.
And if they are speculating and the market goes south, they will lose their investment.
It’s not like there isn’t risk involved.
The people working 90 hour weeks and barely able to make rent apparently aren't working hard enough.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617390/us-millionaire-ho...
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.
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.)
Or, as Margaret Thatcher put it, "...he would rather that the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich." (See https://speakola.com/political/margaret-thatcher-on-socialis... for the full quote.)
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).
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 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.
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.
And so on, and so forth.
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.
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!
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...
Also players selectively mortgaging properties will destroy overall wealth in the game.
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.
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.
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 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.
Zero-sum.
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.
Please explain how iron has been "used up".
In real life however, these disparities are only a problem if people leverage them against others.
Isn't this nearly always the case though? Absent external constraints?
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.
[1] trading game simulation: https://youtu.be/CsRLVZTYpGo?t=313
[1] trading game simulation: https://youtu.be/CsRLVZTYpGo?t=313
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.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/yes_r_g_so_wh...
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.
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.
And of course, you ignore the cases where people bought land and the value dropped (e.g. Detroit).
They don't, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Playing with common house rules tends to remove elements of strategy.
Not unlike real life.
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.
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.
edit: As far as the math goes, here's one such article that goes over it: https://ideas.ted.com/heres-how-to-win-at-monopoly-according...
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).
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
An even better calculation would be how much it's worth to each player based on what they already have as well!
>there is an element of strategy in Monopoly (or can be, if you take the time to learn it).
Buying every property you land on immediately from the bank for listed price is not an optimal strategy.
The way to win monopoly is in trading cards to gain monopolies. The winner is almost always the person who makes the most deals.
A player can win the game simple by making the most deals with other players, even if they are a loser in every single one of those deals.
It's far more a lesson on negotiations and trading - ie. business lessons, not capitalism lessons.
That's how monopoly works in real life.
(Thinking about it, I guess demonstrating this is the function of the jail in the game).
Older: What is 1 plus 1?
Younger: Two. Or eleven.
I see Javascript or law in the future...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Now I see that was actually the core lesson.
Amazon, Google, Facebook moved in and bought almost all the properties.
Apple are doing very well from owning the purples.
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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
[1] http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Everybody_works_but_...
>Anti-Monopoly – a board game with a twist
>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!
Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle
https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-Swindle/dp/09...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly
>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
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US...
The Story of Class Struggle, America's Most Popular Marxist Board Game
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-strugg...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.microp...
Here's the board:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp...
And this is the XML file that defined the board, properties, utilities, cards, etc, which were generated by a Perl script and some PostScript:
https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly
<CHANCECARD TITLE="Download">
<IMAGE X="130" Y="70" SCALE="0.55" EPSFILE="graphics/gatespie.eps"/>
<TEXT X="10" Y="40" SIZE="10">Go directly to Reinstall Windows.</TEXT>
<TEXT X="10" Y="25" SIZE="10">Do not pass Start,</TEXT>
<TEXT X="10" Y="10" SIZE="10">do not collect $200.</TEXT>
</CHANCECARD>
<CORNERS>
<CORNER NAME="Start Menu" INDEX="0" NAME1="START" NAME2="MENU" NAME3="" CAPTION1="COLLECT" CAPTION2="$200 SALARY" CAPTION3="AS YOU PASS" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyStartMenuCorner"/>
<CORNER NAME="Reinstall Windows" INDEX="1" NAME1=" REINSTALL" NAME2=" WINDOWS" NAME3="" CAPTION1="JUST" CAPTION2="REBOOTING" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyReinstallWindowsCorner"/>
<CORNER NAME="Free Software" INDEX="2" NAME1=" FREE" NAME2=" SOFTWARE" NAME3="" CAPTION1="" CAPTION2="" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyFreeSoftwareCorner"/>
<CORNER NAME="Goto Reinstall" INDEX="3" NAME1=" CORRUPTED" NAME2=" REGISTRY" NAME3="" CAPTION1=" GOTO" CAPTION2=" REINSTALL" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyCrashAndReinstallCorner"/>
</CORNERS>
The Microsoft Monopoly Game
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.
[...]
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.
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.
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.
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?
So basically it's ok to sacrifice the minority, as long as it benefits the majority, huh?
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.
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.
Living in a society is quite a tragedy.
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.
The government absolutely can, and does, pass laws to legally take anyone's stuff for any reason it likes.
If that is your bottom line, then almost every government in almost every country I know of overran it almost immediately.
What we are discussing right now is....given that they ca, and do....under what circumstances we want them to do it.
Think of it as a reality based discussion.
No taxing the wealthiest results in the wealthiest moving their capital investments elsewhere.
The reason this isn't done isn't because it's hard, it's because the foxes are running the chicken coop.
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.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
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.)
By the way, "people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer" is a misstatement of the theory.
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?
Should we force people to exercise?
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.
The outcome is still the same: a stalled industry, little to no innovation, and many times, high prices.
(I guess this comment could apply to either the boardgame, or to capitalism.)
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.
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)
Play by the rules and the game is very fun with a lot of strategies.
It forces every property on the board to be owned with just a few times around the board.
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).
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.
Nominative determinism strikes again?
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.
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.
---------------
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.
Carcassonne is probably the best.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Too much dependence on luck, overall.
[1]: https://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/one-thing-to-av...
1. All players play to the end.
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.
------------
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.
I think adding in secret information or hidden objectives can help prevent this.
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?
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.
------
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.
All players keep playing until the end condition.
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.
When the banker gets up to pee, you snatch some bills from the drawer? Or every X turns, roll for chance to hit vault-armor class 0?
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.
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...
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.