> "The seeds of the Monopoly game were planted when James Magie shared with his daughter a copy of Henry George’s best-selling book, “Progress and Poverty,” written in 1879. As an anti-monopolist, James Magie drew from the theories of George, a charismatic politician and economist who believed that individuals should own 100 percent of what they made or created, but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone.
> but that everything found in nature, particularly land, should belong to everyone.
In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.
Interesting little snippet:
> Although both advocated worker's rights, Henry George and Karl Marx were antagonists. Marx saw the Single Tax platform as a step backwards from the transition to communism.[52] On his part, Henry George predicted that if Marx's ideas were tried, the likely result would be a dictatorship.[53]
>In effect, this means state ownership, which we've later learned to be very dangerous when taken to that level.
I dunno. Sounds like a good idea to me. The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention. Currently all that rent-seeking money goes to private individuals who do diddly-squat for the public good. Should society reward sitting on land rights? No, society should award work.
The government owns all the land and rents out 10 year
leases to the highest bidder in the case of contention.
So car company A leases some land for $x builds a factory at a cost of $5x. Good news, jobs for the local economy and whatnot. The factory can't be moved, and they want to operate it for 30 years.
After 10 years the lease comes up for renewal. Car company A wants to renew the lease for another $x. But car company B wants to fuck with their competitors, so they put in a bid for $3x. They know they won't win so they won't have to pay (car company A don't want to lose their $5x factory so they'll have to outbid) - they just want to raise their competitors' expenses.
That happens a few times and all of a sudden nobody wants to build factories any more.
Then you realise the same thing applies to your asshole neighbour's house...
That's a good one. I don't think these problems are insurmountable, though. With enough thought, edge cases can usually be fixed. Proposal: In the event that a financial loss is suffered by the previous tenant losing the lease, the successor must compensate the previous tenant in full.
With enough of a time buffer between the auction and the transfer this might solve the problem.
A Dutch auction, as mentioned in another comment, is an interesting modification as well.
It still doesn't solve the root problem that it's possible to increase land's value and we want to encourage people to do it.
Land with a house on it is worth more than land without a house on it. Land that's been cleaned up is worth more than land that was contaminated in the past.
If, a few years after you increase the land's value, all that extra value goes to the state, why should anyone increase land's value?
How about the difference in rent from one term to the next is paid to the previous tenant? The goal, after all, is not to funnel money to the government, but to not award property rights squatting.
For what it's worth, the experiment has been run in various contexts. Here's an example of Henry George's single land tax being independently arrived at in EVE Online, and fixing a problem with land speculation, as the theory predicts:
"In 1977, Joseph Stiglitz showed that under certain conditions, spending by the government on public goods will increase aggregate land rents by an amount equal to government spending on public goods. This result was dubbed by economists the "Henry George Theorem", as it characterizes a situation where Henry George's 'single tax' on land values, is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures."
One sad thing throughout history is that creators, inventors and really anyone not in the upperclass, got stepped on repeatedly for their creations and robbed of their success and contribution. Many times the copycat is the one that gets all the praise.
This bit was interesting:
She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.
And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on
Another general sad thing, sometimes the bad version you send to the client/customer is the one they like, apparently also baked into history.
Apperently the anti-monopolist version was just not as much fun. This is a board GAME not a morality teaching box, at least for most people who play it.
So I dont see how can compare it to products released to costumers.
I mean, how many games do you, or anybody play where everybody wins or loses the same. I can't think of many video or boardgames where this is the premis. So people just dont seam to care about it.
Co-op modes are exceedingly common in multi-player video games?
Battlestar Galactica, Pandemic, and Shadows over Camelot are popular co-op board games. Pandemic particularly has obtained a good amount of main stream appeal.
I can think of one -- As a birthday present a while back, my kids received a board game called Forbidden Island -- where all the players have to work together to escape the island. During the game, the island is sinking and if they don't all work together, they all lose. My kids love the game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Island_%28game%29
We're just in a period where the pendulum is swinging the other way. It's really fashionable to be 'into' Nikola Tesla, to think he was wronged by history, and to think of Edison as nothing more than a ruthless capitalist who stole his fame, for example. In 50 years, I'm sure we'll be back the other way where Edison embodies all that is good with America.
I've read several biographies of Edison as a kid and the man was a genious. No contest.
I read the part about Tesla and I still don't see the big deal. What exactly did Edison do to Tesla that everybody is so upset about? Edison wanted DC, Tesla AC and Tesla won. Tesla also made lots of money because of his patents too. He could have made more had he not given away large portions of his shares.
A popular feeling is that inventors deserve most of the rewards from their inventions. This is actually quite strange. Inventing is easy - you just find an idea, sit down in your spare time and work out the details for fun, and that's it. But to do business is different - you usually have to spend money before getting any reward and might lose everything you spent. People don't like that. It can also be boring, so they don't do it much. It makes more sense for the lion's share to go to the person doing the work that most people don't want to do. They're the scarce resource, not inventors.
I'm sure most people here have put a lot of work into designing/inventing something or other, but wouldn't feel cheated if they found someone else had seen their idea floating around the internet, rebuilt it independently to fit a paying market, done the hard work marketing it, and finally made money off it. Those are the hard bits!
An inventor might not get the lion's share of the profit made from their invention, however they should at least receive recognition for their contribution.
The linked article strongly implies Elizabeth Magie Philips invented the source material for what later became Monopoly. That we've been playing a cut down version of her game is hardly important, recognition is the least we can offer inventors. It's clear that Parker Brothers did what they could to cut her out of the history of the game, I hope that we don't condone that behaviour.
I'm interested to try The Landlord's Game, I wonder what the situation with the patents are now.
I started to refute this idea with strong reasoning, but then I decided to take the low road and use counter examples.
A great business person, Steve Jobs for example, would have a very hard time with a crappy idea. Even he would have struggled if his product were something stupid, like a toaster that sings a song whenever the toast is done as opposed to something as revolutionary as personal computing. Ideas do matter, and having a unique and useful solution to a real problem is an important part of building a company.
Every business doesn't require a long slog that involves years of effort and personal financial risk. If an inventor creates something truly amazing, like a hoverboard, it will fly off the shelves despite his or her best efforts to screw it up. Great ideas tend to sell themselves and don't always need years of dedication and hard work once the product itself is finished. And fwiw, the majority of inventions require more than a few hours of thought in someone's spare time.
Both idea and execution have equal value, but they don't have to be present in equal proportion as a criteria for success. It's possible build a company with great execution on a mediocre idea or bad execution on a great idea. The best companies are usually balanced between both.
If you found this article interesting check out the Born Yesterday episode [1] about the history of Monopoly, it's far more interesting that it has rights to be.
In classical economics (which I believe in [0]), land is a commodity like any other. There is literally no fundamental difference between land and anything else. Georgists might say that there is no substitute for land, but that is not an important issue unless one person has a monopoly on all land, which is not the case and never will be. So land tax is just a very strange kind of wealth tax. The only effect of land tax would be that the price of properties would go down to account for the future taxes paid on those properties. After that, the taxes would be "priced in" and the tax wouldn't even operate as a wealth tax.
I think land tax is only appealing to people who don't understand income tax (and proper wealth taxes). They have been tricked (by obfuscation from both the left and right) into believing that income and wealth taxes are unable to achieve the goal of meaningful redistribution of wealth.
[0] Yes there are frictions, but not relevant to this discussion.
For those interested in the modern-day inheritor to the Georgist/Distributist movement Magie belonged to, there's no better introductory text than John Medaille's "Towards A Truly Free Market":
I'd love to have a version of Magie's game .. anyone know where there are better pictures of it that can be used to design one? I'm not sure where the trademark/copyright lays these days, but if its in the public domain - why not recreate the original as an app or something? Its very intriguing ..
A PDF of this book is available at http://progressandpoverty.org/