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The Landlord's Game

en.wikipedia.org

71–80 of 170 posts

Re: The Landlord's Game

#71

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?

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…

> 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.

I don't understand how you reach this conclusion. If the original owner spends all of it it enters a whole lot of more peoples pockets than his kids.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

I never thought the game was rigged because I always played with people who played sub-optimal strategies, and I would always win.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#73
post #67

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?

Well if you want to ask why inheritance is moral you should probably also ask why taxes are moral because taxing/abolishing inheritance is a logical extension to that. I urge us all to sit and think about it for a few moments. What are the logical steps and sequence of justifications that led us from a bunch of random people in the middle of nowhere to a point where there is now an entity that [forceably] takes X% of…

Reading your logic here one would think that your musings have lead you to become an anti-capitalist but for some reason this texts strikes me as if it was written by somebody who's far from that position.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#74
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't understand how you reach this conclusion. If the ori…

Increasing the velocity of money doesn't help the world on average. Otherwise the Fed would just set their inflation target higher. Even if you disagree, given that the Fed has a fixed inflation target you can't do anything about it by changing inheritance tax. If you force a bunch of rich people to spend more than they would have, the Fed will just take that money straight back out of the economy.

Sometimes I find all this money swirling around difficult to keep track of. It's easier to forget about money and look at what's happening to the goods and services. Ten families in $1 million houses get more happiness than one family in a $10 million house and nine homeless families. No matter how you shuffle the accounting around it has to add up to that same utility difference.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#75
post #70
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have a good understanding, but is it actually socialist when it is about increasing personal wealth at the core? It does rather sound like a constrained version of capitalism to me.

Socialism tries in increase wealth of individuals, just like capitalism does. The difference is that different flavours of socialism want to increase it across the board, where capitalism wants an individuals wealth to be very well protected, especially when the numbers get high, so that wealth may accumulate in few.

I find it fascinating that the original Monopoly game was desgined to teach us the difference and how Georgism (taxing bad behavior) may be used by "the people/democracy" to ensure capitalism is not the outcome.

Also very telling that the game was thn ripped off, and got popular as Monopoly, where the only set of rules are the capitalistic ones.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#76
post #58

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?

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 wor…

> If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die.

You can treat all gifts a year or less before the date of death as inheritance. Many wealthy parents will be hesitant to give large amounts of money to children while in good health, as they're scared children won't care about them any more once they get their money.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Is there a board game where one's advantage doesn't compound, though?

I used to play the MAD (magazine) board game as a kid. It's pretty good. Pretty crazy, not surprisingly. A lil like Monopoly except the pick-up cards involve doing weird things, or telling every player to pass their money to the player on their right or left, which happens so often that you never are winning for too long.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#78
post #26
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> marketed as a get rich quick scheme I am seeing bus stop ads here in Sydney with a tagline from a BTC exchange saying something like "If you're seeing bitcoin on a billboard, it's time to buy". Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.

If your cabbie understands BTC you might have a point. We aren't even close to there yet

Understanding doesn't come into this. Most people don't understand money any farther than $5 + $5 = $10, and it still works really well. Unlike bitcoin.

Re: The Landlord's Game

#79
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short version: You're _supposed_ to strictly follow the rules AND the lack of pieces. Depleting the bank of houses to upgrade property with as a market cornering tactic. IRL similar to urban growth boundaries and no programs for upgrading the housing within them.

A very interesting twist is to play with real money. Set a sensible exchange rate to real money and treat the Monopoly money as “chips”. The tactics and strategy significantly change because there is real external value to the assets and currency - but only for the duration of the game. Apart from anything else it means the game ends much faster.

Does everyone have to put the same amount of money into it beforehand? How is the bank funded at the start and dissolved at the end?

Re: The Landlord's Game

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Is there a board game where one's advantage doesn't compound, though?

The jargon for this is a "comeback mechanic" - game designers have to be cautious with them though, as if the final round can flip the results too easily what was the point of all the other rounds?

In "Power Grid" (a power plant building game) the turn order is recalculated every round based on how well the player is doing, with the players doing worst getting more chances to bid in power plant auctions and being first to buy on the fuel market.

In "Flamme Rouge" (a cycling-themed game) a 'drafting' mechanic means the leading player has to add 'exhaustion' cards to their hand, much like riders in real races try to slipstream behind the race leaders.

In "Suburbia" (a city building game) victory points are 'population' but as you move up the population tracker, you cross red lines that reduce your income and reputation.

In 'Trans-America' (a railroad-building game) points are scored by connecting cities, and it's easy for a naive player to connect 4 cities before a lucky expert player connects 5 and ends the round. This creates the impression of a close game as the best and worst players will be within 20% of each other.

And of course, the other option is: A scoring system so baffling and opaque, nobody can work out who's in the lead until the calculators come out at the end.

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