Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 374 posts

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

#261

Post by WalterBright »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #92

Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie: "Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the s…

There have been many games that purport to demonstrate that free markets are a failure, all of them had to rig the rules to make that happen.

Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-win solutions are pretty much impossible.

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

#262

Post by mr_toad »

WalterBright wrote: post #261
dr_dshiv wrote: post #92

Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor, Elizabeth Magie: "Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the s…

There have been many games that purport to demonstrate that free markets are a failure, all of them had to rig the rules to make that happen. Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-win solutions are pretty much impossible.

> There is no possibility of increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply.

Sounds pretty much like the housing market where I live.

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

#263

Post by behringer »

Izkata wrote: post #225
behringer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the flipside of over-extending, last time my family played we included auctioning. Didn't take long for my brother to realize he could send it to auction, bid $1 (which no one challenged because we were focused on the partially-completed colors we had), and immediately mortgage it for free money to buy houses on the properties he did care about.

That's genius!

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

#264

Post by WalterBright »

Barrin92 wrote: post #18
chungy wrote: post #10

Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.

as the article points out the game was in particular desgigned to show the economic effects of private land rent, hence the original title 'the landlord's game', and that is in fact a zero sum game as they aren't making any more of it. And in particular on tech websites like these people vastly overstate how non 'zero-sum' economic activity actually is mostly because tech has been in a bubble of highly anomalous grow…

> that is in fact a zero sum game

Not at all. Putting a 10 story building on a lot is multiplying the area by 10.

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

#265

Post by mytherin »

chungy wrote: post #10

Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.

Monopoly is about land, and monopoly teaches people a correct view of land: land is a zero-sum game.

It is striking how much real-life has mirrored monopoly: when the game starts and there is plenty of land to go around, there are no problems. After a while, the land runs out, and the wealthy hoard the land and charge the others for its use. The wealthy then get wealthier and the poor get poorer.

We are now in the later stages of the real-life monopoly match.

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

#266

Post by abfan1127 »

mytherin wrote: post #257
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…

Prisoner's dilemma. A single wealthy person giving up their wealth will not have a large enough effect on society to actually change anything. It will only make them worse off (as they now have less wealth). From the perspective of a single person, hoarding as much wealth as possible is a local optimum. When all wealthy people get together and divide their wealth, this enables education, housing, preventative health…

there seem to be a ton of assumptions in this comment.

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

#267

Post by aeternum »

monocasa wrote: post #247
partiallypro wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

According to this real wages have been rising for the last 30 years: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/

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

#268

Post by big_chungus »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #246
jamie_ca wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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.

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

#269

Post by WalterBright »

pyrale wrote: post #43
chungy wrote: post #10

Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.

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.

> Money increases when you pass start, and cards drawn are on average a source of money.

Money itself is of value only if it can be used to buy stuff. The assets in Monopoly are fixed - more and more money chases the same assets, meaning that the real value of that money remains the same.

Zero-sum.

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

#270

Post by pslw71 »

WalterBright wrote: post #264
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…

> that is in fact a zero sum game Not at all. Putting a 10 story building on a lot is multiplying the area by 10.

And the proceeds still go to the landowner. The times that high rise buildings had cheap rents are long gone.

So what is the point? Get out of your bubble and see how poor people are. Typical Caltech brat.

Post reply on HN