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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)

#361

Post by dorgo »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #337
WalterBright wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And how often can you repeat this

The sky is the limit. Or is it? When prices rise high enough everything gets possible.

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

#362

Post by dorgo »

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 .

> you can't just make more land.

Sure you can. Other planets, moons, habitats... It's just expensive. And the prices are not nearly high enough to justify the investments.

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

#363

Post by ric2b »

GreenJelloShot wrote: post #350
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…

> 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 selfish instincts to the betterment of the nation? So basically it's ok to sacrifice the minority, as long as it benefits the majority, huh?

Not much of a sacrifice when it's just a higher tax rate.

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

#364

Post by ric2b »

mytherin wrote: post #265
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 la…

> and the poor get poorer.

They don't, though.

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

#365

Post by simion314 »

robomartin wrote: post #359
simion314 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that you need to find a way to bring the costs down, I think that a lot of money are wasted, For example in Mathematics or computer science you don't need super expensive equipment, you need good professors that are good at teaching. Some universities have buildings with cheap bedrooms for students, places with cheap but good cooked food. What I think it happened in US is the capitalistic thing where you rais…

It actually is precisely opposite to capitalism. In the US the government guarantees student loans. This means the universities have exactly zero risk. When someone has no risk of losing money because they government will guarantee payment, they will charge and lend any amount to anyone. You can't lose. What would happen if the government got out of student loans and did not guarantee them? Universities would experie…

But if the government stops tomorrow to get involved won't you get a giant backlash? I do not see that universities would stop spending and reduce the costs by 90%, if those universities are also in debt because they planned on the money they won't get you could get them bankrupt. Do you have a solution for this ?

Btw I appreciate you taking time to provide this comments.

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

#366

Post by chuniverse »

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…

“Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started out with the least money had doubled it.”

This seems like an arbitrary cut-off point. How do we know that if the game were to continue the result wouldn’t end up being the same, with one player still controlling a monopoly of all the properties?

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

#367

Post by bena »

blackflame7000 wrote: post #305
bena wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok now do year 2 and see how that $50 turned into a net loss of $146,998.73

You realize you have to double that, right?

It's $146,998.73 for each person. No matter how you slice it, 1.1% is greater than 1%. We're still working with $100 initially.

And if you're talking about one person's unrealized gain, we've already addressed that.

Individually, we may make less, but collectively, we make more.

The idea is that since fortune is largely based on luck and then exploiting that luck, we could be leaving a lot of progress on the table. A landlord who makes their wealth simply by charging rent isn't really doing anything to advance anything. He just happened to own the right bit of land at the right time.

So if we tax him and then use those taxes to provide for those who did not have the same breaks, we may be enabling someone to actually create something that advances technology or science or medicine.

I mean, "individually less, collectively more" also explains why the individual doesn't want to voluntarily give up anything.

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

#368

Post by TimPC »

dragontamer wrote: post #178
TimPC wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel like there are better games than Catan these days, but it was great when people were only thinking about relatively bad games like Monopoly or Risk as their Friday night hangout game.

Agree with that. I just think it's sad that the state of the art for gaming in non-specialist stores is Catan and Ticket to Ride. If places like Indigo were a bit more ambitious in their title selection many people would be playing much better games.

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

#369

Post by dorgo »

Natsu wrote: post #84
epistasis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin: > If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too. https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...

As a counter-point, there's also the tale of the FPS, where the person who has spent 10,000 hours mastering the game will invariably hear that he's a cheating, hacking n00b when he beats the same guy 20 times in a row due to "luck" despite not using any cheats, because the other guy is an idiot with no strategy who can't even aim.

On the other hand noobs are more likely to score by pure luck. In poker there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_beat

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

#370

Post by dang »

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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425495.
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