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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)

#251

Post by Gibbon1 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #244
Corence wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 3…

My friends and I tried the rule that you could loan other players money. We had to stop playing after that.

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

#252

Post by monocasa »

chrisco255 wrote: post #235
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…

I'm not holding my breath on self-driving semi trucks anytime soon. They will be the last type of vehicle to be automated. It takes a lot of skill to drive an 18 wheeler from warehouse to distribution center to warehouse. They are extremely dangerous machines if not handled properly and can easily kill dozens of people if a miscalculation occurs. In the meantime, you could make the same argument about farming equipme…

They're testing self driving trucks on I-70 outside of Denver specifically to test them in the worst conditions. They're not coming, they're already here.

The issue though, isn't that a specific job is going away, but instead the whole class of "human as control theory implementation" is going away. That's way more disruptive. Like, people instead becoming control software for guillotines level disruptive.

> And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.

"Real wages" mean inflation and CPI adjusted so you can actually compare them in a meaningful way. They have indeed been stagnant for median wage earners since the seventies.

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

#253

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

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…

That is... false. Trading down consistently only works if you’re playing with idiots.

Trading a high value property for a low value property makes sense if you get a color set, but if you do this multiple times with bare minimum competence players, the likely outcome is that everyone has at least one set, but you have booth the lowest amount of cash to develop things and the least valuable properties.

With the exception of edge case (although often optimal) strategies where you lock down the available houses, trading down is likely a sign that you’re trying to increase your likelihood of winning from 0% to 10%, while improving the odds to a greater degree for whoever is getting the better deal.

Most properties are superficial until they have specifically 3 houses on them. If you have three color sets, but fewer than 3 houses on any of them, you’re going to lose.

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

#254

Post by throwawayhhakdl »

neilparikh wrote: post #220

The title is incorrect. It was invented to demonstrate with exclusionary land ownership. Even Adam Smith recognised that this would be a problem.

Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially. Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the point of housing shortages

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

#255

Post by mcv »

proc0 wrote: post #45
deweller wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not due to its origin. It's just not a great game due to its widely varied play time, elimination of players and other flaws. If you're new to Euro-style games and enjoy games with some luck and rolling of the dice, check out The Settlers of Catan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan ).

Ah, was that created to show the evils of colonialism? /s

Not every game has a message. Settlers of Catan was created to show what a fun, tight boardgame with some depth and a limited playing time would look like, and kicked off the German boardgame boom as a result.

But if you want a game showing the evils of international politics, give War On Terror a try. You can fight the other players by funding terrorists to fight them, but if everybody does that, the terrorists win and everybody loses.

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

#256

Post by JoshTriplett »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #244
Corence wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 3…

> Yeah, I once played with someone whose strategy was "Never trade".

That's the right strategy for strong play. You should never trade property for mere money. If you absolutely have to, trade property for property if the trade gives you a monopoly, or if (in a more-than-two-player game) doing so gives you a net increase in the number of groups for which you hold at least one property (so you can block anyone from getting a monopoly in those groups without trading with you).

It's not an especially fun strategy, either for you or the people you're playing with.

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

#257

Post by mytherin »

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…

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 care, etc for poorer people in society. This will in turn lead to reduced crime, reduced homelessness, reduced illness and a much more productive society as a whole. This will then in turn generate more money for them.

This is a global optimum that will make everybody better off, including the rich, but it is not easy to achieve. It requires long-term vision, which is difficult in a world driven by quarterly reports and four year election cycles.

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

#258

Post by salawat »

phamilton wrote: post #169
thaumasiotes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

...But any real Capitalist would then see the opportunity to stop investing in real estate, leverage his real estate as collateral, and build more houses. Thereby increasing supply, and creating even more wealth by offering his new houses to the other players.

Of course this would pressure the house hoarder into building hotels... Except each other player gets a set of dice, and on rolling anything higher than a 4, his hotel construction is thwarted by decree of the community's zoning board. UNLESS he's making deals under the table, increasing number he has to roll under to get approval from the zoning board.

And so on, and so forth.

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

#259

Post by skybrian »

drdeca wrote: post #216
skybrian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I often wonder if there could be a feasible system by which things inside a large company could be run by a market-like thing, and whether that could end up using work more efficiently. I hear about some part of a company requesting another part do some market research on some topic, and then just entirely disregard the results, when the market research department could have used that effort and time and money to do…

Companies do experiment with this sometimes as part of the budget-making process, as well as internal competition. I haven't heard of any big wins though.

It seems better to take internal functions and open them up to outside customers, as the cloud computing companies do.

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

#260

Post by notacoward »

nwah1 wrote: post #224
notacoward wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians" (as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via mere repetition.

Common ownership is the term Henry George used. Of course, keeping the title system was specifically preferred in order to limit the scope of government. Just need to pay for the land you use, since it belongs to all. We should, perhaps, distinguish common ownership from public ownership. The concept of the Commons is one that people ought to understand. Something can be owned in common without it being managed by th…

George wrote a lot about the commons, and you're right that it's important to understand the relationship between state/common/private ownership, but I stand by the statement that its use here - without that context, where more common capitalist vs. communist notions of property are already being discussed - is misleading. It's like throwing "bad faith" into a discussion without being clear that it refers to a domain-specific concept from law or existentialist philosophy.
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