Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by dTal » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

big_chungus wrote: post #268

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#332

Post by dTal » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #303

_bpgl wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> The marker of the arrested mind of the libertarian. Personal insults are against site rules, and that comment comes mighty close.

It's against a class of belief, not an individual, and it's harsh but accurate; libertarianism represents a frustratingly truncated thought process.

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

#333

Post by dTal » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

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.

That's exactly the crux of the observation about land and rent-seeking that Monopoly seeks to illustrate - you can't just make more land.

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

#334

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

dTal wrote: post #333

WalterBright wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly the crux of the observation about land and rent-seeking that Monopoly seeks to illustrate - you can't just make more land .

Of course you can make more. Build a 10 story building and you've got 10x the floor space. People do that all the time in places were land is in short supply. Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually work.

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

#335

Post by mcv » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 10:17 AM UTC

TimPC wrote: post #148

Spellman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick on Catan. 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 hav…

Catan can get pretty uninteresting due to dice variance. I've had games where two players made lots of resources on 9 and two players made lots of resources on 5. Five got rolled 14 times and 9 got rolled 3 times. Even with good spots if the dice are against you it can easily become a lot of do nothing while other people play the game. A lot of people also play with the houserule no trading because there is too much…

When we played Catan every single day for a year during the 1990s, we ran into the dice variance issue plenty of time that we considered creating a bag with 36 chits with the dice distribution, guaranteeing that all dice results would come up in the expected ratios. Or maybe 72 chits to remove the predictability when the bag starts to get empty, and return the chits once you got a complete set of 36 out.

But as you can see, the idea quickly became way too complicated and we never implemented it.

Removing trading sounds like a terrible idea. Being able to monopolise a resource just to trade it for what you really need, is a feature, not a bug. Some resources are rare, and you need to take that into account during placement.

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

#336

Post by mcv » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 10:24 AM UTC

TimPC wrote: post #154

dragontamer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"First to 10 points wins". "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.

Settlers of Catan is a deeply flawed game. It's far better than monopoly but is definitely too dice-heavy and kingmaker oriented. Dominion is in a lot of ways among the worst games in the genre it created as most of the variants that followed added more interesting mechanics and tradeoffs. It should get a lot of credit for being original so I guess I'm fine with calling it a great game. Splendor is a classic.

I honestly haven't seen any pure deckbuilding game that's as good as Dominion. It works very well in Quest for El Dorado, but that's not pure deckbuilding (great game, though).

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.

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

#337

Post by BlargMcLarg » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #334

dTal wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the crux of the observation about land and rent-seeking that Monopoly seeks to illustrate - you can't just make more land .

Of course you can make more. Build a 10 story building and you've got 10x the floor space. People do that all the time in places were land is in short supply. Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually work.

And how often can you repeat this until you have effectively solved the optimum, and the situation devolves into zero-sum anyway? Are we growing the pie, or are we just rediscovering how big the pie is by optimizing better?

>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.

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

#338

Post by AstralStorm » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

abfan1127 wrote: post #266

mytherin wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assumptions are testable, e.g. using game models. Such as Monopoly.

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.

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

#339

Post by dTal » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #334

dTal wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the crux of the observation about land and rent-seeking that Monopoly seeks to illustrate - you can't just make more land .

Of course you can make more. Build a 10 story building and you've got 10x the floor space. People do that all the time in places were land is in short supply. Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually work.

In addition to my excellent sibling's note that this is a very finite solution to a boundless problem, land has a lot more uses than living space. Let's see a 10 story runway.

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

#340

Post by andrepd » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #115

andrepd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That house rule (which is far from universally applied) is a small detail. The game is boring (luck-based, little if any strategy) and unenjoyable in other ways: it takes too long to finish, players who go bust early are left watching the game continue for maybe hours, front-runners are almost certainly going to win yet it takes an excruciatingly drawn-out process to finish the process, etc.

If you follow the actual rules, the game rarely lasts more than an hour. The main rule that no one follows that speeds up the game is auctioning a property when there person doesn't want to buy it. It forces every property on the board to be owned with just a few times around the board.

Everytime I played, people always bought properties if able, since it's so obviously worth it, so auctions (which where in the rules) happened very seldom anyways.