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The Landlord's Game

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Re: The Landlord's Game

#51

Post by sooheon »

standardUser wrote: post #14
larsiusprime wrote: post #7

For anyone curious about the philosophy behind this game, known variously as Georgism or Geoism, a decent review of the principle text, Progress & Poverty, was just posted on Astral Codex Ten: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr... (A bit long, but pretty comprehensive and hey, it's shorter than the actual book).

I will take a look at this. But in the past, my (meager) attempts at understanding Georgism have not been very successful. I'd love to see some examples of what specific laws would be implemented, what taxation would look like (in actual percentages and dollar amounts) and things like that to understand what a system could look like in action.

Georgism is a pigovian tax on individual land ownership and rent collection. It would reduce or remove taxes arising from labor or capital entrepreneurship, and purely tax the zero-value-add rent collected by the "landed gentry".

Actual percentages and dollar amounts is impossible to give in general, but the basic idea is that returns to pure ownership of land (without improvements) should approach zero. This should eliminate the risk-free speculative ownership of empty lots downtown that are just waiting to cash out on rising land prices due to improvements made by other capitalists and collected taxes.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#52

Post by lordnacho »

midasuni wrote: post #48
BeetleB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I hated about Monopoly is that when you're down, you rarely can make a come back. It's not long before you know if you're going to win or not, and the rest of the game is just a slow death for the other players. No real joy.

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

Perhaps the most intrigueing meta observation of the monopoly game is how the players seem to never recognise how it is rigged, at least years of playing it with my cousins never revealed the didactic purpose to any of us. When we played people always took it seriously, ie that there are smart things you can do and you should do them, but we never stepped back and pointed out how the rules made the losers more and more desperate.

We also modified the rules as kids. Who'd have thought the lack of houses was by design, and of it was, who could think it was a fair thing to do, cornering the market?

I certainly didn't think about the dynamics until I studied economics and read articles about how the game was designed. Only my later self, with a background in trading would recognise the rules for what they are, and the strategic possibilities.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#53

Post by BeetleB »

midasuni wrote: post #48
BeetleB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I hated about Monopoly is that when you're down, you rarely can make a come back. It's not long before you know if you're going to win or not, and the rest of the game is just a slow death for the other players. No real joy.

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that it was not much of a fun game. As a kid, I played board games to have fun. Monopoly failed to deliver.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#54

Post by bushbaba »

midasuni wrote: post #48
BeetleB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I hated about Monopoly is that when you're down, you rarely can make a come back. It's not long before you know if you're going to win or not, and the rest of the game is just a slow death for the other players. No real joy.

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

It leaves out an important piece though, inheritance.

No way for you to win if there’s another player who inherits a small fortune of existing properties on the board.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#55

Post by wombatmobile »

BeetleB wrote: post #53
midasuni wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

I don't disagree. I'm merely pointing out that it was not much of a fun game. As a kid, I played board games to have fun. Monopoly failed to deliver.

> I played board games to have fun. Monopoly failed to deliver.

A common sentiment, and yet "Over 250 million sets of Monopoly have been sold since its invention and the game has been played by over half a billion people making it possibly the most popular board game in the world." [1]

Why?

[1] https://www.loc.gov/rr/business/businesshistory/December/mon...

Re: The Landlord's Game

#56

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

midasuni wrote: post #49
anonporridge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Smith also wanted inheritance mostly abolished except for the small amount necessary to continue supporting a man's wife and young children.

Yes Smith was great. Why is inheritance moral? One person gets something for free, the other works and has to pay tax?

So tax inheritance?

Re: The Landlord's Game

#57

Post by cies »

midasuni wrote: post #48
BeetleB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing I hated about Monopoly is that when you're down, you rarely can make a come back. It's not long before you know if you're going to win or not, and the rest of the game is just a slow death for the other players. No real joy.

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

Did you read the WP article? It seems the original game had 2 sets of rules:

> The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game.[3] A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake.

So one rules similar to modern day Monopoly. And one that teach us the virtues of "social policies". (can I say socialism here without being down voted to hell?)

And there was a clear intend to teach its players about "unfairness":

> The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.

I've learned something today!

Also, I'm quite a fan of Georgism (tax bad behavior so heavy it disappears). For instance, I think we should georgize pollution and wealth hoarding.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#58

Post by jusssi »

midasuni wrote: post #49
anonporridge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Smith also wanted inheritance mostly abolished except for the small amount necessary to continue supporting a man's wife and young children.

Yes Smith was great. Why is inheritance moral? One person gets something for free, the other works and has to pay tax?

Many places in the world you pay a tax for inheritance.

For 100% (or otherwise significant) inheritance tax, the issue is how to implement it. If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die. If gifts are also 100% taxed, you sell your property to them (and then spring up a company and hire them to do "work", so they get the money back). If sale of property and work are 100% taxed, well, it's a very different kind of economy.

100% inheritance tax only hurts when someone dies unexpectedly. Others will be prepared with workarounds.

Where I live, both inheritance and gifts are taxed with very similar rates. Also, selling things under their market value is considered gifting (which sometimes gets interesting, for obvious reasons).

Re: The Landlord's Game

#59

Post by hkt »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #56
midasuni wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Smith was great. Why is inheritance moral? One person gets something for free, the other works and has to pay tax?

So tax inheritance?

In the UK pro-inheritance folks like to call it a "death tax" and argue it'll rob people of the ability to pass things along to their children. The debate is caustic and unpleasant to say the least.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#60

Post by OscarCunningham »

midasuni wrote: post #49
anonporridge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adam Smith also wanted inheritance mostly abolished except for the small amount necessary to continue supporting a man's wife and young children.

Yes Smith was great. Why is inheritance moral? One person gets something for free, the other works and has to pay tax?

Someone's working in both cases. In the case of inheritance it's the person who gave the money in their will. That person also already paid tax when they earned the money in the first place.

If anything I think we should encourage rich people to give their money away (even if only to their children) since wealth consumed by a broader number of people leads to more happiness than if it's all consumed by one person. It's better for a $10 million fortune to be spent by 10 consecutive generations than for it to all be spent by the original owner.

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