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Monopoly turned out to be an accurate predictor of modern capitalism: for every one winner there are 2-7 losers.
the beautiful, brutal irony then being that the inventor was gulled out of a fortune by a pair of capitalist predators who made a killing out of her invention
This is why I cheat every time I play Monopoly - because the lesson of capitalism isn't 'don't cheat', it's 'it's not cheating if you don't get caught', and I feel like my nieces and nephews need to be reminded of that from time to time.
I hate that I agree with this.
That’s the rule that keeps people on their toes! I remember as a kid, if someone lands on your property, YOU have to call it. Mom and Dad have no obligation to help you bankrupt them.
Oh I straight up slip $500 bills out of the bank when no one is looking, I fuck with the banker (get my $200 for passing go, 'drop' one of them in my lap, and say 'Hey you only gave me $100'), etc. When I cheat I full-on cheat. ;)
Monopoly was designed to show the absurdities of capitalism
The ORIGINAL game (The Landlord Game) was blatantly so, then the game was stolen and the rough edges were removed to make it less obvious
It was openly a political tract! To quote from the rules of the 1906 edition:
The Landlord's Game is based on present prevailing business methods. This the players can prove for themselves; and they can also prove what must be the logical outcome of such a system, i.e., that the land monopolist has absolute control of the situation. [...] By this simple method one can satisfy himself of the truth of the assertion that the land monopolist is monarch of the world. The remedy is the Single Tax.
More accurately the absurdities of land-ownership for profit, as the woman who created it was a Georgist rather than anti-capitalist. Georgists believe in capitalism, except land and natural resources should be held in common (usually through a land tax rather than actual common ownership)
It works well for criticizing capitalism in general as well though.
And it's not actually an accurate representation of capitalismin the first place.
I wish I magically got $200 for every milestone I passed.
If you're the type of person who's investing in multiple properties then there's a good chance you did literally just get free money all the time from your parents. I think that's part of the point.
The $200 was added from the original game, which had the point of illustrating the point of being broke and having to pay rent absolutely everywhere.
Universal basic income FTW!
Do you not get paid by your employer?
I'm pretty sure GO represents income.
Not 2/3rd of the cost of a Park place location, no.
That's because it's a make believe board game .. it would be pretty boring if you had to go around the board 500 times just to put a deposit down on Old Kent Road.
But in real life, people do tend to receive a predictable sum of money at regular intervals ...
That’s not magically getting $200. That’s me working for it… Monopoly has no concept of work, except BS prizes like 2nd place in the beauty contest.
Maybe because it's a board game about buying property .. the daily grind of the player earning their money is irrelevant.
It's perfectly reasonable to assume the player would be receiving predictable income from employment at regular intervals.
I don't know why this reddit-ism, that is incredibly easily disproven, gets repeated so much The origial game, The Landlord Game was made to promote Georgism and a Land Value tax. Unless you think that when the Parker Brother toy company adapted it they turned it into an anti-capitalist statement it's pretty clearly not true.
Couldn't wealth redistribution via Georgist tax systems aimed at discouraging land monopolies be considered "anti capitalist"?
I think of capitalists as being anti wealth redistribution outside of market forces.
Given that most modern georgists would consider themselves capitalists and in some cases even libertarians and that basically all self identified capitalists, save like ancaps, still support some form of trust busting/monopoly prevention I'd say no unless we are defining "anti capitalist" so broadly as to be meaningless.
Yes, that's the irony.
Turns out most people would rather take a chance on being the winner than create a fair system.
We can’t create a fair system when the winners have all the money AND influence/power.
People’s perception on what being a winner is screwed up. Staying under florescents lights in a cubicle in a crowded polluted city for 50 years to get a number to go big is considered winning.
But what about the shareholders???
No, that's just losing less. The "winners" are on their yachts snorting cocaine from the ass crack of hookers.
People's brains over-estimate a tiny chance to win big over a huge chance to lose little; that is how lotteries work.
"If i play and win big, it is going to be great. To win, i just have to keep trying. It'll work next time."
Why did your comment get down voted so much?
Perhaps because they don't know the definition of irony.
Most people I know play Socialist monopoly.
They don’t call it that. It’s a few basic rules that work to effectively redistribute cash from the wealthy to the poorest players.
Like putting fines and taxes under free parking so anyone can grab a lotto win on a lucky roll.
Also increasing the 200 for passing GO on each turn round the board so you do end up with a UBI.
The only way to make the game fun is, not ironically at all, to remove the rough edges from an exploitative system and even the playing field.
Most people I know play Socialist monopoly.
They don’t call it that. It’s a few basic rules that work to effectively redistribute cash from the wealthy to the poorest players.
What? That would make an already long game even longer. Do they also play poker by folding on royal flush?
Games last days.
It’s honestly an awful board game.
Nothing stops you from not charging each other rent and pooling resources to speed lap and drain the bank. You're not creative enough for that it seems. Hundreds of other ways you could 'beat the system's variate the gameplay.
And I mean you can just sit around the table and smile at each other. That can be fun.
That's the duality of life. Can't have winners without losers. If everyone is a rockstar, who will be in the audience?
Why would the audience be the "losers?" Everyone's there to just enjoy the music. There's space to coexist for a lot of things.
Why would the audience be the "losers?"
Someone's paying the musician, since it takes a lot of investment to become a capable musician. You can't just pick up the clarinet and become Benny Goodman.
It didn’t predict anything. That’s how the world was when the game first came out
Even more so during that time
World wars followed by the Information Age shocked the old system, but it’s returning
It’s how the world has always been. Nature is survival of the fittest. Think about how many babies most species have and how few of them sucées in becoming dominant adults
It’s how the world has always been
Not for humans, it hasn't. People still live in tribal villages today who do not have anyone taking significantly more than their fair share of the tribe's production. Capitalism is a fairly new evil, invented when the first psychopath said "I deserve more than anyone else in my village".
Bullshit, capitalism is roughly 200-300 years old. Before that we had the Feudal system (Kings and queens and stuff) which was also unfair, but didn't have landlords (or rarely).
Human society has been hierarchical for roughly 10,000 years, since the advent of agriculture. Before that time, nobody really had anything that was worth stealing, so the price of trying to fight someone is far higher than any benefit you might gain from trying to steal something.
Society has always changed and will continue to do so. It is up to us to make sure it changes for the better.
Before that we had the Feudal system
Well, mercantilism was dominant school of economic thought for a while between feudalism and capitalism
Wow, that's just wrong in every way possible.
Monopoly is a light form of what we see today… today it’s start the game with 50$, everything already has hotels on it. You just rent.
yep, most people are essentialy modern slaves with extras and extra steps lol
and they dont even know
Funfact, back when slavery was being abolished, the republican party actually opposed "wage slavery" by which they meant working for a capitalist.
The way they saw it, the people who work run a workplace ought to own it, and all the profit should be theirs.
this used to be the original idea and how it often worked during certain time periods for sure.
Accurate in layered ways.
- Designed by a communist to show how unstable capitalism is.
- Eventually, someone owns everything and everyone else is bankrupt.
- When played by the rules, it's a short game.
- Most houses don't play by the rules.
- Instead, they invent "house rules" that pump more money, buildings and/or credit into the game. That way the game can last longer.
Makes the game last longer, but doesn't actually give anybody who is behind a chance of winning. The winner is a foregone conclusion at a certain point but it adds the illusion that you're still playing the game from a similar standing.
IRL we cheat and make house rules so the game can go on indefinitely.
indefinitely
I guess we'll see about that
It was imminent 64,364 days ago. I'm not holding my breath.
Not with my house rules, haha. We have the rule that all money paid for the chance cards goes into free parking, and landing on that space after the game has been going on a while often ends up being like winning the lottery, haha.
One time I won the game after hitting it because then I had the cash to afford doing a risky move despite having hardly any property. I convinced my dad (who had Boardwalk) to take my Park Place for a bunch more cash and the third light blue space. And my mom to trade for her third green space for cash and the last pink space. I won the game with nothing but the light blue and pink spaces despite my mom having triple green and triple orange and my dad having double dark blue and triple yellow because I was able to afford hotels on all the spaces within just a few turns and had cash to spare.
Your parents just aren’t very good at the game it seems. Most of the time if nobody has houses/hotels yet, dark blue and green are the two worst possible sets.
Your dad having the yellows was almost great, until he wasted all of his money chasing parkplace. He should have just built houses on yellow and run everybody out of the game, even if he had to mortgage boardwalk because he stretched himself too thin.
Nah, they actually aren’t. It was definitely a gamble on my part because they weren’t super low on cash. They already had some houses on orange and yellow. They were mainly focused on competing against each other at that point because they were pretty evenly matched. I was badly losing. I only had those two light blues, the two pinks, a green, park place, and maybe a railroad IIRC. And like no cash. IIRC it only really went south for them because I got lucky and got all that extra cash to buy houses and then hotels with, and kept missing their spots. But they repeatedly hit mine and ended up having to sell their houses before I ever hit them. If I would have hit those yellows or greens with houses a couple times I probably would have been having to sell my houses too, haha.
Instead, they invent "house rules" that pump more money, buildings and/or credit into the game. That way the game can last longer.
Most house rules aren't intended to make the game last longer. They're used because the default rules are intentionally designed to make the game not fun. Because, as you said, the original purpose is the game was propaganda, not fun or accuracy.
Also:
- Invented by a capitalist, who immediately patented and licensed it
- Sold to other capitalists who made it massively successful
Real life is not zero sum
A lot of things are. If boss pays worker $1 more per hour in wages, that’s $1/hr less in boss’s pocket. If landlord charges tenant less for rent, that’s less money for landlord. Etc etc, on and on.
You’re leaving out hugely important parts in those exchanges. In the boss/employee exchange the boss is receiving labor which they are exchanging for money. Landlord/tenant, the tenant is receiving housing.
It’s not zero sum because people are using time and natural resources to create new value. A simplified example would be someone digging up a chunk of gold. That gold’s value is now added to the overall value of the system. If that person spent their time crafting that gold into jewelry or some other item of value it would add more value into the system
But employers and landlords aren't the person picking up or the making the jewelry. The company owner would be the one paying someone else to dig up the gold while earning much more from that gold, and the landlord is the one buying the land the gold is on, and only allow access to miners who pay.
Workers create value, the owners only manipulate and channel that value by dispossessing the working class and using the state's monopoly of violence to maintain a claim to their property.
Hence me statement “simplified example”
If being an owner takes nothing other than manipulating others, why aren’t you doing that?
Being the owner/creator of a company involves investment which is taking a risk. There needs to be a potential reward for taking a risk otherwise no one would take the risk. Fairness and balance of the system aside there do need to be people taking the risk of investing in new ventures, without that there would be no work for the working class.
I know what you want to say, but I kinda wanna reply that given your example, the jeweler isn't adding value to the system, but is paid for spending their time working on the gold piece.
The jewelry they create is more valuable than the unfinished hunk of gold and loose gemstones they started with. They’re not being paid merely because they spent time, but because they spent time doing something that adds value.
Thank you
Jewelry was just an example, I picked it because it was very straightforward. You could swap gold and jewelry with wood and chopsticks. The idea is importing resources into the system and using time to turn the resource into something of higher value
That assumes that the $1 doesn't increase the productivity of the employee. Maybe they can finally get enough sleep and work better if they don't need to worry as much about how they'll pay their bills.
Or, maybe they won’t be as motivated to spend as many hours working if they aren’t constantly insecure
Hours of work is not necessarily proportionate to the amount of things that get done, except where the hours are literally what the work is measured by. You may also find that the quality of work decreases with the number of hours worked such that you might get the same output with only 80% of the hours.
Monopoly isn’t either
Tell that to every billionaire in the US.
This is largely a capitalist trick. Yes cash is not zero sum (sort of - the system builds in ways to make it much easier for a small few to obtain, at the noticeable expense of everyday folk), but many primary forms of wealth absolutely are zero sum, notably land, property, and natural resources. Once those are bought up, there is less (in some cases none) for everyone else, and those at the bottom and even in the middle start to go adrift from the average standard of living. The counter argument is of course to say they are still better off than their equivalents in the past, but this is only to say things could be worse, not that the system is working well. Anyone not in the fortunate percentage at the top will struggle under the current system, that percentage changes up and down depending on the state of the economy, but by its nature the system necessitates the suffering of those at the bottom
the system necessitates the suffering of those at the bottom
Only in relative terms.
In absolute terms they suffer less. So far, always, compared to the alternatives.
Will that continue forever? Probably not, but prediction is hard, especially of the future.
I'm starting to get the feeling almost everything posted on this sub is either stupid, or an influencer post trying to undermine US institutions. Only someone very biased could see growing up in the US with acces to education, sanitation, and rule of law as "losing" because they're not ridiculously wealthy. We'd all be a lot happier if we just appreciated what we have instead of focusing on greener ficticious pastures.
Those things aren’t for everyone and we don’t all have access to them.
The vast majority does though
there is no such thing as "modern capitalism". That's just a term assigned to a mixed economy, ran by federal reserve money printing and big corporations dealing with politicians to write laws to help monopolize them. Nothing to do with capitalism.
And the game ends, when no one can afford basic living anymore.
in the karma farming top 10 for sure, just bash capitalism
There's a reason it gets you karma...
Monopoly is almost the opposite of capitalism. In real life, someone constructs a new row of houses in an adjacent neighborhood, rent prices will fall in nearby neighborhoods. Supply and demand, you know the drill. But in Monopoly building houses increases the rent on that particular property, while leaving rents on the other properties unchanged. An increase in that supply has *no effect* on prices? That's not capitalism.
A better capitalism simulator is Settlers of Catan, where investments actually produce dividends instead of simply extracting wealth from other players. The price of commodities like wheat and wood are set by both the producers and the consumers of these goods, with highly desired and scarce goods commanding a premium. The "winner" in Catan is the player who gets 10 points first. But all players get at least a few points during the game, so even the "losers" in the game end up with a settlement that is wealthier than when they started.
Capitalism is the worst except for all those other types of economic systems.
Nope, several forms of libertarian socialism are pretty damn based.
It really hit for me the time my wife joined a game with me and the kids midway through. She was just instantly screwed. No chance.
Are you calling poor people losers?
People born after 2000 have a really strange view on capitalism and socialism. I urge you to educate yourself on life in Europe during last century and to see the difference in countries that were/are socialist and capitalist. It is so sad seeing young Americans blaming every bad thing on capitalism, escpecially since you are born in a capitalist country that has brought you and generations before you so much wealth and luxury (compared to the rest of the world). One being rich does not mean that others become poor.
One being rich does not mean that others become poor.
Wait, isn't that what "rich" means? Having more than others?
And isn't, for example, prevalent issue in the US and EU the lack of affordable housing? It's like if there are more poor people there? Or maybe like if you'd need to be rich(er than most) to own a property?
One being rich does not mean that others become poor.
Wait, isn't that what "rich" means? Having more than others?
What you've shown is that the pile of gold is bigger than it used to be, and that the difference between stratas are growing…
Look, isn't that like with a cake? No matter how you split the cake, you cannot have portions of it that are bigger than the whole cake.
Look, isn't that like with a cake? No matter how you split the cake, you cannot have portions of it that are bigger than the whole cake.
No, because it's not zero sum.
You can have half a small cake, or a quarter of a much bigger cake. A quarter is less than a half, sure, but you still end up with more cake in the end.
They’ve been tricked into thinking our current system is some sort of capitalist paradise that anyone who likes capitalism is a fan of. It’s ironic that the people complaining about how our capitalist system is so bad are the ones that keep voting in policies that make everything worse. Based on the comments section it’s obviously working. What a genius idea by the government to trick the populace into thinking that giving the government control over everything and manipulating the market is capitalism. Not sure how continuing to give the government more power and having them dip their fingers into every aspect of the business cycle is capitalist….
The only countries that were actually socialist in Europe, were revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovchina, and maybe Yugoslavia. Other places had very little worker-ownership.
Wide divisions in wealth is a problem regardless of where the bottom is. Even primates can react strongly to unfairness. Capitalism and greed have prevented the young from having any power or say in their futures. Just consider the age and make up of our three branches.
Capitalism and power refuses to budge or give an inch. That has them looking for other systems.
There is no country that is purely capitalistic or socialist. The words have lost meaning. You have to look at the details of the laws of each country. The only reason america has so much wealth is because of its resources, land, location, and riding off of ww2
There is no country that is purely capitalistic or socialist.
While that is true, the countries that people call "socialist" aren't even remotely socialist, whereas at least the "capitalist" countries are practicing a form of it.
Start with comparing east and west Europe after WWII. Then the change former Soviet nations went through in the 90’s
We ran an A/B Test (closest thing to a scientific experiment) a couple of times:
- Soviet Russia v USA
- West Berlin v East Berlin
- North Korea v South Korea
In *every* case only one side prospered, was innovative, it was improving the citizens' wellbeing continuously, was allowing freedoms, and people from the other side were desperate to move there.
See, this is the problem. People are taught that it's a reductive A/B test, a simple choice between totalitarian repression and... some kind of dream version of capitalism that doesn't exist yet.
If you take even a moment to think about it, that's an absurd simplification designed to stop you looking for a better way of doing things.
We are smarter than this. We have to be.
Mate you are free to come up with a system that's better than capitalism. We are rooting for you.
Thanks, I'll do what I can, but we might need a plan B 😅
They also pretty much all come from soviet totalitarianism, with maybe a few coming from mao (which was inspired by lenin, and a bit stalin).
Thinking soviet totalitarianism is in any way close to forms of marxist beliefs with actual democratic ideals and workers actually owning the means of production is lunacy at best.
Read “Road to Serfdom”, F.Hayek
If you take even a moment to think about it, that's an absurd simplification designed to stop you looking for a better way of doing things.
We are smarter than this. We have to be.
You've said a lot of things about designing better systems.
You have not yet said anything about a better system.
Do you see why people might not take you seriously
No, that's entirely fallacious. Asking individuals to invent a fire-extinguisher before you'll let them tell you that your house is on fire is only going to end one way.
We need to accept that the system isn't working before we can fix it. Denial will doom is all.
We need to accept that the system isn't working before we can fix it.
Ok, so let's say for the sake of argument that we have. What then? What does your "fix it" look like?
We need to figure out how to regulate business without stifling it, so that invisible costs like public health impacts, pollution and climate change are no longer left to be picked up by the public while private companies extract all the money; how to prioritize the common good over profit at any cost, so that is no longer ok to sacrifice everything else to boost profits or the share price; we need transparency, accountability and consistent application of existing laws and we need to get corporate money out of politics so that these laws aren't constantly gutted, loopholed or sabotaged by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and our elected representatives can prioritize the wishes of the People over the wishes of various lobby groups.
That would be a good start, anyway.
Oh ok so still capitalism, just not crony capitalism like we have now.
Yeah sounds reasonable, good ideas.
Yes, I think capitalism as a definition has become so broad that it's slightly useless now in many ways. As the responses to this thread have reminded me!
Comparing the USSR to the USA is a bit unfair, as they come from very different contexts. Also, state-capitalism isn't the only alternative to liberal capitalism.
That's incorrect if you measure winning as elimination starvation, availability of healthcare, education, and safety.
Yep, and communism is russian roulette with a hand grenade.
That's why I rob the winners
And the bigger you win, the more people you need to lose to support you. Billionaires need a lot more than 2-7 people to lose in order to get that rich, they need thousands upon thousands of people to lose. And then they tell us they made it by working hard.
In before this one gets locked. It would be neat if there were only 2-7 losers for every winner, it’s more like 2-7 million though.
and once that one person has all the property everyone just struggles. The thing with Monopoly is we simply give up and flip the board. In real life the children of the rich inherit everything so any new players don't stand much a chance.
this is when historically speaking revolutions arose
Marx’ Das Kapital predates Monopoly by 40 years. Only thing modern about capitalism was capitalist’s success in removing all socialist taint from beloved American reformers and politicians and making people believe that free market = freedom and capitalism = democracy.
What are you talking about? The only system to raise people in general out of poverty is capitalism. In capitalism, some people Win more than others, but everyone wins.
but this is reddit, capitalism bad mkay ..
Slavery in the USA existed under capitalism. Not everyone wins.
Slavery existed in ancient Americas, ancient Africa, ancient Australia, ancient Asia, ancient Europe and the ancient Middle East. It existed in the 1800s in every corner of the world. It existed in every type of government, in every type of economic system, and in every type of culture.
Then Capitalism in the west kept growing their economies until slaves were no longer profitable. The first countries to END slavery were capitalist countries. The institution of slavery in the west was literally destroyed by the rise of capitalism and its need for higher skill labor.
If you're stupid and economically illiterate maybe. When China and India liberalized their economy, the quality of life, and GDP rose tremendously for pretty much all citizens. There's no doubt that capitalism has enrichen and fed more Chinese and Indian than every Marxist economic though combined. If you want to see an economic system that keeps creating losers and created by losers, check out centrally planned economies. Inefficient, corrupt, and prone to abuses. Pray that you never live under one.
That is literally what the game was made to show
That's literally the point of the game.
Only 2-7? I think it's much higher than that
This was always the point of the game.
to play the game IS to lose.
only 1 % get anything worthwhile out of it.
(and most of them are sociopaths.)
but hey , let's continue, like it's the only game there is , right ?
That’s generally how competition goes.
In reality, when the environment is fucked beyond all recognition, we ALL lose.
The greatest joy is to see self as other and Earth as mother.
May peace prevail 🙏
Modern? This has been true since the dawn of time.
Um, that's kinda the whole point of Monopoly, Gibbs.
This is like one of those the Simpsons predicted 2024. It's like no, these issues existed in the past too.
And it takes forever to see who they'll be
It's not a prediction, it's an illustration of the same shit that was happening when it was created. The game was originally designed to show players that industrial capitalism is socially destructive. Then Parker Bros got hold of it and turned it into a commercial success by having it celebrate the socially destructive tendencies of monopolization.
9 times out of ten no one wins and everyone quits halfway through
Also like capitalism, it's just a shittily designed game.
Monopoly accurately describes what a monopoly is.
Everyone gets a chance and can play again. Russian roulette is a little harder to play every Friday nite.
I wouldn't call it accurate, in the real world it looks more like 1 win to 10,000 losses - and I rounded it optimistically.
still remember reading an article some whiny snowflake made about the game, bashing it because one person wins by taking money from everyone else
1 to 2-7
i don't think you are even remotely aware of current situation
There are so many other better reasons Monopoly emulates capitalism and you picked the worst example.
Most games fit this description.
There being one winner and multiple losers in snakes and ladders doesnt make it an accurate predictor of modern capitalism
I think history is best viewed through a capitalist lens. It's popular to say it was racism that motivated colonialism. It wasn't. It was money, money and more money. It's the wealthy exploiting the weak and poor. The Poor Irish, Scots, Italians, eastern Europeans, Africans, First Nations, people of India, the Polynesians, all equally exploited by generally what were corporations: the Dutch East and West India companies, the British East India Company and so on. It's a real misreading of history I think to say Whites exploited people of colour. Corporate interests exploited everyone regardless of colour.
Compared to what?
The inventor may have intended the game to simulate land ownership, without realizing he was illustrating a much older (as in older than humans) mathematical issue called The Pareto Principle.
Basically, The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule), the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").
So, you could apply this to most distributions of outcomes. Novels, movies, hit songs, geniuses, serial killers, trees in the forest, the success of despots, virtually any life form down to bacteria that has ever lived on earth and they ever will.
And, property ownership.
But there is nothing unique about the Pareto Principle as it applies capitalism, and it predates capitalism by about forever. It predates the existence of the planet earth (distribution of stellar dust that coalesces into a star and a planet, and distribution of livable planets).
Almost right. Except there's about a millionish losers per winner (if we are talking about the USA, some places it's a wee bit better, others vastly worse), it's totally fucked. There are about 300ish people that are winners in the USA. Then you have a lower tier of semi-winners, who are doing great, but the "real winners" can dictate substantial societal control and shifts, look at amazon, look at Twitter.
The real truth, as historically demonstrated in Russia and France, until the top 300 are "managed democratically", along with their top underlings and the majority of their families, things are only going to get worse for every one.
That said, this isn't a call to action nor an attempt at such, when/if that call comes, it's not going to be my bullshit reddit post that does it, I'm not delusional or trying to burn down a business, don't misunderstand, I'm talking historical perspective here.
What I am saying is this is just how it is, that's how things work in human history. It might be soon, could be a century or more, but sooner or later, things are going to get real fucked by the wealth inequality we have here. Sooner or later, it's going to end with a lot of people dying to kill a handful of extremely rich people and all their friends and family. Once that happens, things will have a CHANCE at either recovering or the cycle beginning again immediately, followed by more violence until it gets better again.
After that? Maybe a century or two and it'll happen again. Welcome to America? Nah, welcome to Planet Earth, we all suck here.
"losers" are more of a result of human nature and the natural world and the difficulties inherent to it. It's true that capitalism doesn't solve those issues completely but what does.
Figure out why, then take your new knowledge to the real world. That's the big game.
sometimes when you win, you really lose
And then people like Biden point at that one person making money and claim it means the economy is doing well
Wait till you see communism numbers.
You could work it by emptying the bank. There were two win scenarios
Your only takeaway is that one player wins and everybody else loses? That's true for pretty much every non-team game or sport that exists.
I’d argue it’s allot higher than 2-7 losers
Those losers chose to play.
I think the people who have lived in countries that are run by alternative economic models will disagree.
I mean, it is hard to view for example the average person living in Sweden (where I live, a country working under capitalism) as a "loser" compared to the average person living in Laos, North Korea or Venezuela (three countries with communism systems).
In before: "That isn't REAL communism". If that's what you think, fine, but it is one of the alternatives to capitalism, and I am not a fan of how those countries operate.
Except in real life, for every winner there are 200-700,000 losers.
Interesting. Where did you see capitalism in action?
Capitalism is so bad that the people who complains about it don’t want to move to non-capitalist countries.
I'd say losers is a strong word. People still live their lives. They get married and have kids. Sure, they can't take vacations to Bali, and struggle with bills, but they continue to live, love, and laugh.
Monopoly has one winner and up to seven losers. It's a metaphor; I'm not calling non-millionaires losers!
Viewing 2-7 people as losers isn't accurate though. Suggesting fewer win than lose isn't right.
In my college sociology class our teacher broke us up into groups of 5 and made all 150+ of us play a game of monopoly. I got lucky at the beginning and was ultimately in the lead the entire game. When we started to come to a close she explained that each student would be graded based off how much money they had at the end of the game and that this grade would count for 15% of the entire grade for the class. I was immediately furious as I was playing with one of my friends from high school whom always had good grades and worked hard to get good grades. I raised my hand a proceeded to ask my teacher if I can distribute my money to my fellow players and all of us get a 80% on the assignment. She said no, I threatened to walk out of the class if she didn’t let me do it. After some negotiations I eventually convinced her give everyone else a passing grade and I would take the failing grade even though I had the money which should equate to me getting a 100. This class still haunts me to this day. I know she was trying to make a point but it threatened my friend’s gpa and I knew he wanted to go to graduate school for advanced engineering. I think I learned that day that I hate most wealthy people because they don’t seem to care about their friends or community and that they have the power to affect change but are so driven by greed that they never could talk themselves into doing anything.
I can sort of believe that it happened, but it was also really obvious to everyone in the class except OP that the teacher didn't actually mean it. No professor is actually going to base 15% of your grade on a game of Monopoly.
Why those fake stories always say they "proceeded to" do something. I's very rarely used in real stories but like 90% of the /r/thatHappened posts have this word in it.
I'm not a native speeker so it's hard for me to judge how natural it sounds.
You can choose to not believe me but I assure you it did happen and was a critical lesson I took away from college.
Your teacher knew exactly what they were doing, bravo 👏🏼
Was sorta shocked no one else had the same response as I did.
They weren’t in your shoes and couldn’t put themselves there because they had “lost.” The perspective is different when you thought you were about to lose and suddenly win, vs when you win and realize the top is lonely when everyone else lost.
That was the point. It was made to demonstrate the evils of monopolies.
Monopoly also shows that shit can get real very quickly when money is involved, regardless of relationships.
Or maybe everyone is winning but at different rates. But propaganda tells you otherwise.
Globally it is closer to 1000 : 1.
For every one winner there are about 200 - 700 Million losers...
Absolutely nobody needed a game to figure that out. If only $100 existed, and someone got lucky enough to get $99 of those dollars, the other people are going to have a bad time.
Capitalism is all about hoarding wealth.
This wasn't a lucky prediction. It was in inevitable outcome.
You seem to be under the impression that billionaires keep their money in a big Scrooge McDuck vault.
I am not and I never said anything to the contrary.
That would be like me saying "You seem under the impression that billionaires are sharing the wealth and capitalism works out for all players"
Which can be INFERRED by your comment, but would also be a massive jump to conclusion based on your small disagreement about what I meant by "Hoarding the wealth"
Okay, please define what you mean by "hoarding wealth". That seems to be the point of disagreement here.
Capitalism is all about investing. Hoarding is actively disincentivized.
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The original iteration of the game was The Landlords’ Game, released in 1904. It was supposed to be a critique of the entire concept of landlords. The slow, grinding, inevitable winning of whoever got the best, first pass at the board, was intentional and meant to feel lousy for everyone involved.