Recently the BBC ran a story about the history of the game Monopoly and how it was originally developed to demonstrate the flaws of capitalism and later developed by Parker Brothers to extol its virtues. (Link to BBC story: http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170728-monopoly-was-invented-to-demonstrate-the-evils-of-capitalism?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook ) As a child, my sister and I played Monopoly for hours. One summer in particular, when I was 11 and she was 9, we lived in a neighborhood with several children around our ages. When it was too hot to build tumbleweed forts outside, we had Monopoly marathons on the floor of our bedroom with those children. Often the games involved cheating, hiding one’s wealth, secret alliances, and lots of arguing, as well as gossiping and flirting, and one game could go on for days.
I remember those games as being lots of fun, but I realize that I did learn valuable lessons from them. As an adult, I invested in property, always owning my own home and some rental property, and I managed on my teacher’s salary to increase my wealth moderately. But I also learned that the inevitable conclusion to the game was that only one person ended up with everything and everyone else ended up frustrated or resentful or outright furious. I can remember winning the game and sitting there with a pile of paper money and deeds and no friends. What was the point of that, I wondered, when the fun part was the process of playing.
We even figured out some ways to keep the game going. Sometimes we wouldn’t allow players to have more than one monopoly, or we wouldn’t allow more than two houses on a property. Sometimes we stopped the game and the bank passed out extra money to everyone. Sometimes we looked the other way when broke players stole from the bank. Sometimes the biggest landlords would stop charging rent, usually in order to prevent outright rebellions. We never came up with the original inventor’s idea of charging a “tax” that was shared every time someone bought property.
After years of playing Monopoly, it seemed to me that if one wanted a game that kept on being fun for everyone, if one wanted an economy that chugged along working for everyone, then individually amassing as much wealth as possible was not the way to go. The rules of Monopoly needed to be changed in my opinion. There needed to be a way to prevent great inequalities in wealth if the game were to be kept going and be fun for all. So I guess the original inventor’s goal of demonstrating the evils of capitalism succeeded after all!
A couple of days after I wrote this, the following was in the comics (on 8/4/17):
