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

bbc.com

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

#191

Post by three_seagrass »

airstrike wrote: post #55
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.

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)

The "Do not pass Go" mechanic effectively means some players skip income and it's not uniform inflation.

Also players selectively mortgaging properties will destroy overall wealth in the game.

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

#192

Post by iso1210 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #155
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that's really depressing. I thought hard work and good ideas were important and valuable contributions to society.

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.

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

#193

Post by StillBored »

hirundo wrote: post #93
Barrin92 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grow…

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.

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

#194

Post by robomartin »

speedgoose wrote: post #85
robomartin wrote: post #46

[flagged]

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.

[flagged]

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

#195

Post by solotronics »

justizin wrote: post #127
solotronics wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

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.

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

#196

Post by bhelkey »

sokoloff wrote: post #114
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…

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.

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

#197

Post by cryptica »

chrisco255 wrote: post #184
cryptica wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 resul…

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…

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.

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

#198

Post by Barrin92 »

xixixao wrote: post #57
Barrin92 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grow…

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.

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

#200

Post by simion314 »

robomartin wrote: post #183
simion314 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> 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…

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?

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