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Real-Life Monopoly |
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The next time you get together with family or friends for a game night, try playing “Real-Life” Monopoly. “Real-Life” Monopoly is different from the standard version in two key ways.
1) In standard Monopoly, everybody starts the game with $1500 dollars and nothing else. In “Real-Life” Monopoly, some players start the game with more money than others. A lot more.
Let’s say you have five players. Each player represents a fifth of the American population, based on wealth. One represents the wealthiest 20%, one the next wealthiest 20%, and so forth. To put it another way, you’ve got one upper class person, one from the upper middle class, one from the middle middle class, one from the working class, and one who lives in poverty. Based on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, their starting amounts are: $3727, $1747, $1110, $660, $262.
2) In standard Monopoly, the rules are set in advance and cannot change during the course of the game. In “Real-Life” Monopoly, the rules change frequently. Every time he or she passes “Go,“ the wealthiest player gets to make a new rule. The rule has to be impartial. For example, if the player owns a hotel on Park Place, she can’t make the rule that all rent on Park Place hotels is doubled. She can, however, double the rent on all properties with hotels - which would benefit her if she owned the most hotels.
Standard Monopoly is a fair game. Everyone starts out on a level playing field, and everyone has equal opportunity to make money. No one can manipulate the format of the game to benefit themselves. There is a degree of luck involved, but most of the time, the person who wins is the one who plays the game the most intelligently.
Too often, we assume that our actual American economy works by the same equitable principles. But in reality, we don’t start on anything close to a level playing field. Poor people have nowhere near the assets, the opportunities, the advantages, and the safety nets that wealthy people have to help them succeed. Not only does our system give the wealthy a huge head start, the rich also have the power to change the system to give them even more benefit. I don’t think I need to expound on the massive amount of influence that money has on our political process. The rich really do get to adjust the rules in their favor. How else would we have gotten things like HMO’s and tax cuts for the highest earning Americans?
I would like to try an experiment: Get as many people as possible to play “Real-Life” Monopoly, with the two changes I described above. Tally the numbers and see what percentage of winners come from the upper class, the upper middle, the middle class, the working class, and the truly poor. It would be interesting to compare the results with percentages of folks from each group in real life who pull off the American Dream and become wealthy.
“Not only does our system give the wealthy a huge head start…”
It sucks when you aren’t given what you want, but instead have to own it or earn it. But if you want a “system” (meaning the state) that is powerful enough to give people benefits at the expense of others by force of law, then you will have a system that those with power and influence will manipulate for their own benefits or in which millions will be killed in order to stamp out undesirable thinking.
The “system” is a lot more than the state. It also includes corporations, religious and voluntary groups, the media, general cultural attitudes and prejudices, and much more - and it all feeds into this notion that wealthy people have all earned their wealth and poor people all deserve to be poor. In fact, the state is but a small part of the problem, and the solutions (for the most part) are not governmental.
Most of the rich were born on third base and were told they’d hit a triple.
Don’t we already have this system. To combat the distrust in banks, the finance industry, and the stock market after the depression and WWII (and consequently to rollback New Deal legislation to ensure that another crash would happen) multinational corporations and the top 2-5% of the shareholder class funded billions into think tanks that would sway the middle class into thinking that their tax money goes to fund lazy black welfare moms with eight kids while instead that money actually goes to violent psychopathic militarists who send arms to Latin American, South Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries to “stamp out” those who resist theft of national resources by Western corporation see: 1953 Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, support for Saddam in the 70’s-80’s. The invasion of Iraq targeted Saddam for switching his currency reserves from the dollar and now Iraqi civilians aren’t allowed basic sanitation, clean water, or electricity because they are undesirable. If you compare the amount of funds budgeted to the Pentagon, it dwarfs low-income assistance by a factor of over 1000.
Plus it just makes sense, the top shareholders have enough disposable income to pay for political campaigns of friendly politicians, who in turn give them bailouts, subsidies, friendly legislation and promote anti-social safety net legislation–the direct cause of the mortgage collapse and the recent economic downturn. Sure poor, disabled, elderly get some government handouts but just enought to buy products that the shareholders have invested in at stores that the shareholders hold interest in. So even handouts to the poor have a economic benefit for the ultra-rich. If in fact executive wages were not growing by factors of 100 year to year there would still be enough to sustain a strong middle class management class and increase jobs for the working class but tax havens, economic “free-trade” zones, and repressive social policies in some countries overseas have enticed manufacturing jobs to be moved out of the united states by the investor class.
Intersting take on Monopoly. Worth playing under these rules as a social experiment. But how do you decide who starts at what social position? Draw straws?
Another take would be, if you knew all of the players playing ability at Monopoly, to start the person who wins most often at the lowest level and/or the person who loses the most at the highest level to see if they gravitate to thier normal end of game positions.
Now if I could only get people to play board game s again.
Did a 3rd grader write this?
Additionally the article makes the point that the free market isn’t necessarily free but skewed highly in favor of the very rich. Corporate welfare in the form of petrochemical subsidies, free use of the armed forces for protection of overseas investments, tax loopholes for multinational corporations who can hide their assets overseas in the Caymans (so they actually pay less taxes than the very poor, communist-style intellectual property rights that stamp out innovation for entrepreneurs in the middle and lower classes, immigration licensing quotas that limit competition for professional level jobs and lower wages for the working class, expensive standardized testing regimes that dictate a facile and largely irrelevant curriculum for the public schools, and deregulation in the mutual funds, student and home loans industries that lock even the hardest working middle class into debt and poverty while the Wall Street failures keep their exorbitant bonuses and even get welfare from the government because they are “too big to fail.” At one time right after the second world war, hard work and saving might have lifted someone from poverty but the system is skewed against anyone from the small business and working class because everyone has been tricked into thinking they are rich when in fact, the system does nothing for them. The majority of that 36% tax rate you pay is a giveaway to a bloated and unnecessary defense establishment.
I think you analogy to monopoly is close, except you make the assumption that we should be playing a single generation as the game. We don’t work this way in the real world, our parents work hard to give us a better life than they had. If you want to swing the other way to what the liberals suggest try this. Start with your rules as above because I feel that this is a fair assestment, but everytime a penalty comes up you make the payment based of income. The more money you have the more you pay. Then when you pass go you evaluate your worth and the rich pay to the other players and the middle does nothing and the poor get the money. Then we if you land on a hotel it works this way, if your rich you pay all of it, the middle pays all of it, and the poor pay 8% from their pockets and the rest is paid from the bank. I will also suggest though that if the rich land on any jail card that they can’t go to jail period. The middle is normal and the poor have to stay until they get two sets of doubles and if they land there three times they stay forever. Just some suggestions to make it more real.
Thanks for the suggestion
And that is why the Scandinavian countries where taxes are highly progressive are the most aggressive and warlike, threatening their citizens and neighboring countries for speaking their minds. Conversely the US has a system that allows nearly infinite diversity of incomes, and this creates a peaceful country with a contented citizenry where equal opportunity is the norm, has the goodwill of most of the world and military intervention is nearly unheard of.