Monopoly and Trust

Board game night is a delight that my young family will probably soon age out of; our son turns 13 next month, and so he’s unlikely to want to sit around with his family playing games for much longer. We have a decent selection of games at home, and we’ve had some tremendous fun with cooperative games, such as Pandemic (well, it was more fun before it became reality), as well as the world-building games such as Catan and its imitators. However, sometimes the kids insist upon one of the two larger, more traditional, longer-form games that, honestly, are a real pain to play: namely, Risk and Monopoly.

Both games suffer from being too long, and from having the obvious winner emerge long before the actual end of the game is in sight. We almost never finish either game; either it drags on too late and we have to go to bed, or someone gets bad luck and loses early on and it feels cruel to continue, or we reach that point where it’s clear who’s going to win and we decide not to spend the next hour watching their slow march to victory. In Risk, this means that someone has roughly half the armies and territories on the board, and it’s a matter of them winning a few major battles, turning in cards for successive mass army dumps, and steamrolling the board; unfortunately, this entails dozens, if not hundreds, of dice-rolls, and while it’s fun for the steamroller, not so for the rest of us. In Monopoly, it’s similar: when one player has a bunch of hotels and the rest of us have sold off our buildings and mortgaged our properties just to stay alive, there’s absolutely no path to victory for anyone but the winning player — and it’s really no fun marching around the board just waiting until you are unlucky enough to land on Park Place or Marvin Gardens and officially end the game.

The flaws of both games, to my wife and myself, are also somewhat philosophical: they encourage world domination and hyper-competitiveness, ideals that really run counter to our own. We’ve never been the type of parents to prohibit a game for philosophical reasons, but it just leaves a bad taste in our mouths to “win” a game with those implications. I mean, do you really want to celebrate charging enough rent to bankrupt people, or conquering Afghanistan (only to lose it a few turns later), at this moment in history?

You may not know this, but Monopoly was actually designed with the intent of being a terrible game — or at least, it was designed to showcase the very inequities that make the game terrible. The original version of the game was called The Landlord’s Game and was developed by Lizzie Magie over 100 years ago as an explicit criticism of monopolistic, capitalistic practices. Before it was bought by Parker Brothers and turned into the mass-produced game we all know, it had made the rounds as an early-20th-Century indie game, played among progressives and intellectuals, including Clarence Darrow, who modified the game to reflect the streets of Atlantic City and sold an initial version to Parker Brothers (who then learned that they had to buy the original patent from Magie). In particular, the “flaws” of the game are:

1. It’s highly luck-driven; whoever gets lucky early on and buys up property early on has a tremendous advantage, and it’s virtually impossible to “catch up” without tremendous luck falling your own way;
2. The “salary” of the game — a sort of Universal Basic Income of $200 every time around the board — seems decent at first but cannot keep up with inflating housing costs;
3. The competitive nature of landlords in trying to outdo one another will always bankrupt renters.

All in all, the game was intended to be unfair, and to teach young players that the system of land-ownership and rent is inherently unfair. It’s a lesson that could not possibly have been more lost in contemporary America, and yet, the game is one of the most widely-played games in the world, with seemingly countless incarnations, and on top of that, most players even agree that it is frustrating and unfair.

Our family, like many, has tried to deal with this inherent unfairness with a variety of house rules. Perhaps the most common “house rule” used by many involves placing most of the tax/fee money into the middle of the board, with the stipulation that landing on “Free Parking” means you win this pot. As many have discovered, though, this rule only prolongs the already-interminable game, without actually making it much fairer. Basically, by throwing extra money into the game from time to time, you keep it going longer, but everyone except the majority landowner still eventually goes bankrupt.

Last night, however, my wife happened upon a strategy that seemed to, for the first time since I ever started playing the game, work, in that it kept the game going in a way that would have probably been infinite, had we not agreed to call it a 4-way tie and stop. Here is how the game progressed:

• Unusually, everyone had a fairly decent first couple trips around the board; all of us had a decent smattering of mismatched properties. So the “luck” factor wasn’t as steep in one direction.
• My wife was the first to develop a monopoly — the light blues, the second-cheapest property set — and built hotels there before any of us had built houses anywhere else.
• Because these properties don’t have overwhelming payouts, she got off to a comfortable lead, but not an overwhelming one; everyone was still in the game for a while.
• At one point, she drew a “Chance” card that required her to pay $100 fee for each hotel. At the time, this almost wiped out her cash resources, and she frowned, unhappy at this seemingly unfair turn of events. However, a turn later, our daughter landed on Connecticut Avenue and owed my wife $500, more than making up for the penalty she’d paid a turn earlier. From this I took two important lessons

1. As if it weren’t already obvious, land ownership will always generate wealth, so even an “unfair” fee or tax is one that the ownership class can always make up later on. There is no way to tax them out of their wealth.
2. Despite this, the pain that landlords feel when they lose money by virtue of being landlords, such as many are experiencing now as tenants find themselves unable to pay rent nationwide, is real. Even though my wife still had the advantage, it felt unfair that this card should affect her and not anyone else, just by virtue of her status as a property owner in the game. In the short term, it was a brutal hit, and she couldn’t see beyond that to the reality that she was never, at all, in danger of losing the game.

• As the game progressed and we all developed monopolies, our 8-year-old daughter fell behind. She had mortgaged all her properties, and sat there with no buildings, no way of collecting rent, and few cash reserves. At this point, it seemed as though her defeat would signal the end of the game for the rest of us. However…
• My lovely wife did not want the game to end. So, when our daughter landed on a property of mine, and owed me $220 — money that I desperately needed, as my wife was running away with the game and I couldn’t survive another trip to one of her properties — my wife agreed to just pay the rent for her. Our daughter got to stay in the game, without me losing out on the rent I needed to collect to stay alive. My wife quipped, “I’m giving my children money — like a Boomer parent!”
• My wife’s generosity continued as the game went on. As each of us landed on her properties and owed her more than we could handle, she cut us breaks; she still collected rent, but only what she deemed as “fair.” So when my son owed her $450 but only had $400, she chose to charge him $150 instead. Thus, she still collected enough cash to be in the lead, while everyone else still had plenty of money to keep playing.
• Still being competitive, I started to acquire enough cash to build houses on my own properties — but then the spirit of generosity caught me, too. Once I had enough houses built to “deserve” higher payouts, I, too, let people pay what they could afford, instead of trying to wipe anyone out.
• After a while playing like this, everyone had plenty of money. We were exchanging it back and forth within the rules of the game (the official rules allow for pretty much any negotiation between parties, after all), but no one was seeking to wipe anyone out and “win.” As a result, it felt like we’d established a functioning equilibrium, a working economy. It was, we all felt, a true victory for Socialism and Sharing!

Well, not quite. There were some important lessons to be gleaned from this experience, lessons that I believe are highly applicable to the real world, but they’re not all completely sunny. Here is a summary of what I learned about economics yesterday evening:

1. Generosity is great, but you can only afford to be generous once you’ve established enough wealth and ownership that you’re not in jeopardy. I had to collect whatever rent I could to stay alive; once I’d build myself a nice row of houses on the board, such that I knew I could make any amount back that I needed, I could afford to start giving things away for free.
2. Similarly, the working classes cannot be expected to be generous. As my daughter and, at times, my son lagged behind, we never asked them to forgo any rent collection. Now, my son had money, but not enough houses to earn a lot back. This reiterates an important Marxist distinction — that is, while we often focus on the divide between “rich” and “poor,” Marx draws the line between those who own the means of production and those who don’t. Owning property (or stock, or capital, etc.) means you can always make your money back; relying on a salary, even a very big salary, means that you are still working-class and still subject to losing it all with just a little bad luck.
3. A functioning economy is one in which everyone can participate — and it’s better, even for the ownership classes, to promote a fair economy. The game ends when everyone goes bankrupt, and you can’t keep collecting rent from bankrupt people. Distributing money more fairly keeps the economy going, helps everyone stay “in the game,” and means there’s always some money out there to collect in rent.
4. It’s still true, however, that you need to be lucky enough to be on top in order to start taking positive steps. Sadly, our game relied upon the sort of noblesse oblige of one player who was powerful enough not to fear the potential for selfishness among her less-well-off comrades. No rule change (which is analogous to government-led initiatives) ever mattered so much as the generosity of a single wealthy person, and yet that single wealthy person needed to exist, through unfairness, in order to be in a position to help.
5. Finally, competitiveness is always a lurking beast, a potential problem. I felt it in myself as I had an opportunity, through my wife’s generous approach, to “win.” All I had to do was compete without offering my own breaks — without giving in to peer pressure — and her deference would have been for naught. That is, if I’d insisted on collecting in full from my children, I was in a position to build a much more powerful empire on the board than my wife’s, and could have easily been the sole victor. My family would have looked at me with annoyance, but hey, I’d have had all the money and property at the end, right? That is to say, unless everyone agrees to play along with this more generous spirit, one unscrupulous individual can take advantage.

So, the lessons were mixed. I feel like a true victory for “Socialism” would have meant that a rule change managed to create a balanced economy; it didn’t. A true victory for “Capitalism” would have meant that somehow the market forces in the game forced equilibrium — we already know they don’t, in Monopoly or in real life. A true victory for “Communism” or “Democracy” or “Labor” would have meant that somehow, the three of us united without any power to force the leading player to give up some of her advantage. Instead, strangely enough, it was noblesse oblige, that quaint, paternalistic, patronizing attitude of 19th-Century Liberals, that made the balanced economy work. One player achieved the early advantages but, loving her family more than herself, she wanted to keep the game going instead of crushing her competition.

But therein are some possibly more valuable lessons. For one, we are a family; our desire to “keep the game going” stemmed entirely from that relationship, and in the real world it’s sadly absent. The more we can look on one another as part of a large family, the more likely we are to push generosity. Similarly, the transparency of generosity led to a form of peer pressure. If landlords actually publicly cut rents, might this not put pressure — social pressure, if not market pressure — on other landlords to follow suit? Perhaps the risk of falling behind your competitors is counterbalanced by the pressure you put on them to risk the same.

More than anything, though, the game revealed that choosing to do the “right” or “noncompetitive” thing is, truly, a privilege. Those who are not members of the true Bourgeoisie, those who are not owners of capital, of the means of production, and who are therefore one bad dice roll away from losing anything with no way to gain it back, simply cannot be expected to sacrifice for the greater good. Competition is, unfortunately, natural and unavoidable when you’re struggling to even stay alive in the game. It is up to those who own the world to decide what sort of world it is they’d like to live in, and what sort of world they’d like the rest of us to live in, as well.