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Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

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Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#161

Post by chrisco255 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #146
dr_dshiv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 myste…

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…

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.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#162

Post by refurb »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #146
dr_dshiv wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 myste…

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…

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.

It’s not like there isn’t risk involved.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#163

Post by Corence »

danem wrote: post #68
pyrale wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monopoly game is not zero-sum. Money increases when you pass start, and cards drawn are on average a source of money. In fact, the money owned by players inflates as the game goes on.

Don't the rules of monopoly guarantee all players but one go bankrupt?

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.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#164

Post by lukifer »

misterbwong wrote: post #79
epistasis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > 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?...

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…

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. :)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#165

Post by skybrian »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #145
dr_dshiv wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 remi…

> 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 aut…

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.)

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#166

Post by Apocryphon »

cryptica wrote: post #131

"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";…

Just call it LVT, as the land value tax is the policy focus of the ideology. It would fit in next to other acronyms in vogue like UBI, MMT, FJG, etc.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#167

Post by fjp »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #145
dr_dshiv wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 remi…

> 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 aut…

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.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#168

Post by behringer »

nck4222 wrote: post #123
jandrese wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, that goes back to my original comment: >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.

To clarify, if you send a property to auction you can still bid on it. You can even use this technique to over extend a competitor.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#169

Post by phamilton »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #96
skybrian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Maybe not your point, but:

> 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.

Re: Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)

#170

Post by cryptica »

chrisco255 wrote: post #149
xg15 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my intentional actions (successful business) 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…

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 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.

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