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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)

#241

Post by _bpgl »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #233
dr_dshiv wrote: post #143

Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem…

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

#242

Post by lsiebert »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #233
dr_dshiv wrote: post #143

Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem…

People don't always make the rational choice for long term benefits when there are short term gains to be had. Individuals, thanks to bounded rationality, tend to seek satisfactory solutions, not optimal ones. It takes coordinated effort to find optimal solutions.

Another way to think of it is, that by benefiting from public goods (roads, law enforcement, health regulations) already in existence you and your family have already entered into a social contract with the government, which acts as a representative of the collective will of all people towards a more perfect union, and in which payment is due for the benefits you have obtained.

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

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

#243

Post by chrisco255 »

sgift wrote: post #229
chrisco255 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can. I used to work in a retirement community in Florida. I met thousands of retirees who either through their own business or from stock earned in a corporate job or from a solid 401K savings had more than $1 million in net worth. There's more than 10 million households with a net worth of over $1 million in the U.S [1]. It's not hard work and perseverance that matters. It's smart work and money management that…

Perfect example for survivorship bias. To live in a retirement community you have to have money. So, when you work in a retirement community you see retired people who have money. What you don't see are all the people who made the same decisions, did the same things, but for some reason didn't end up in a retirement community in Florida.

There's plenty of lower-income retirement communities in Florida too. You can buy homes there for $100K or so, so you don't even need to be a millionaire. I would say, that if 1 in 30 Americans are millionaires, that is direct evidence that it's not some impossible, unachievable dream. 1 in 3 have a net worth greater than $200K.

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

#244

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

Corence wrote: post #163
danem wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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

#245

Post by dkonofalski »

travisoneill1 wrote: post #100
andy_ppp wrote: post #4

I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they won... I certainly always feel like I deserve to have won.

It's all about negotiating better property trades. The dice have little to do with it.

That's not true at all. If you roll dice and only land on empty properties and corners, you'll have nothing to negotiate with. Negotiation only works if both parties have something of value and the dice determine whether players have something of value.

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

#246

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jamie_ca wrote: post #238
GreenJelloShot wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem…

Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each." Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not do do so voluntarily. However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-successful citizens away from their selfis…

A lot of these arguments also tend to elide the fact that even under the most "extreme" tax structures in place or being proposed in first-world democracies across the globe, wealthy people are still wealthy even with those taxes. In practice, no one serious is actually talking about forcing Bill Gates to give up all his money so it can be apportioned equally to every American citizen. If Gates had to pay an annual wealth tax of 2%, started with $90B (the most recent estimate of his net worth I can find), and made $2B a year (which is less than the most recent estimate of his annual wealth increase I can find), then after 20 years he would have... $93B.

I'm aware libertarians believe it's the principle of the thing, dammit, but I'm truly weary of arguments which boil down to "Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is philosophically indistinguishable from a call for nationalizing all industry."

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

#247

Post by monocasa »

partiallypro wrote: post #240
notJim wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the marxist argument is that the productivity gains of the industrial revolution would allow unprecedented human freedom, if not for their capture by the small class of people who own the means of production. The labor movement has played an enormous role in ensuring the working class gets a fairer share, via the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, etc. We may see another example of this if Andrew Yang…

"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…

What stats are you looking at?

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.

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

#248

Post by bena »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #233
dr_dshiv wrote: post #143

Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem…

Let's say that you could somehow increase your wealth by 1% each day.

If you have $100, tomorrow you will have $101. Then $102.01. And so on and so forth. At the end of the year, you'll have $3778.34

Now let's say that if you give $50 to someone else, you can both increase your wealth by 1.1% each day. At the end, both of you will have $2711.08. Individually less, but collectively more.

That's the issue: individually less.

While you may get some benefit from the collective betterment of society, it still requires sacrificing some portion of your potential maximum wealth.

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

#249

Post by dkonofalski »

koheripbal wrote: post #70
dsiegel2275 wrote: post #38

I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation. If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it. Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if every player started the game with 10 times more money...

I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson. The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure the most property monopolies. The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal, and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals. Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to Monopoly than the people in…

Have you actually played Monopoly until the end? The winner is not usually the person that makes the most deals. It's the person who makes the best deals for the dice rolls. If you buy blue, green, and yellow blocks through deals, you're almost always guaranteed to win regardless of how many deals you've made outside of those. The remaining players can continue to make deals and, as long as you don't accept them, they can never win.

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

#250

Post by bosswipe »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #233
dr_dshiv wrote: post #143

Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so that they can make more? If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and the problem…

Everybody gains from the wealth created by something like a city park, whether they contribute or not. So there's a game theoretic problem that prevents reaching the wealth maxima without public collaboration. For example you might end up with a strip mall that produces more wealth for a few people but less overall wealth for the whole community then the park because surrounding land values don't benefit as much.
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