Monopoly was popular with kids on my block back in Palo Alto in the 60's. At least, it was omnipresent in collections, and we'd attempt to play it every so often...
I can't remember one game that didn't feature (a) disputes about rules and the administration of the bank; (b) animosity and dissatisfaction upon exit; and (c) hollow emptiness for the (newly friendless)"winner".
The one thing I hated about Monopoly is that when you're down, you rarely can make a come back. It's not long before you know if you're going to win or not, and the rest of the game is just a slow death for the other players. No real joy.
Perhaps the most intrigueing meta observation of the monopoly game is how the players seem to never recognise how it is rigged, at least years of playing it with my cousins never revealed the didactic purpose to any of us. When we played people always took it seriously, ie that there are smart things you can do and you should do them, but we never stepped back and pointed out how the rules made the losers more and more desperate.
We also modified the rules as kids. Who'd have thought the lack of houses was by design, and of it was, who could think it was a fair thing to do, cornering the market?
I certainly didn't think about the dynamics until I studied economics and read articles about how the game was designed. Only my later self, with a background in trading would recognise the rules for what they are, and the strategic possibilities.
The jargon for this is a "comeback mechanic" - game designers have to be cautious with them though, as if the final round can flip the results too easily what was the point of all the other rounds?
In "Power Grid" (a power plant building game) the turn order is recalculated every round based on how well the player is doing, with the players doing worst getting more chances to bid in power plant auctions and being first to buy on the fuel market.
In "Flamme Rouge" (a cycling-themed game) a 'drafting' mechanic means the leading player has to add 'exhaustion' cards to their hand, much like riders in real races try to slipstream behind the race leaders.
In "Suburbia" (a city building game) victory points are 'population' but as you move up the population tracker, you cross red lines that reduce your income and reputation.
In 'Trans-America' (a railroad-building game) points are scored by connecting cities, and it's easy for a naive player to connect 4 cities before a lucky expert player connects 5 and ends the round. This creates the impression of a close game as the best and worst players will be within 20% of each other.
And of course, the other option is: A scoring system so baffling and opaque, nobody can work out who's in the lead until the calculators come out at the end.
A countervailing pattern I've seen (in games with 3+ players) is that, if one player pulls into a lead, then the other players will start piling on them. Board games like Avalon Hill Civilization, Family Business, Root, etc. -- basically any game where you can choose one of your rivals to attack.
Munchkin takes this to the extreme, where someone will perpetually be on the edge of winning and there are a variety of colorful ways to set them back. It's random and chaotic by design.
Monopoly doesn't really involve such a mechanic. You can refuse to trade with someone who is pulling ahead, but by that time it is more likely to be too late.
Dominion is a great example of this. For most games (depending on which cards are played there may be differing victory conditions) the way you win the game is by obtaining Province cards and adding them to your deck. These are worth a lot of points, but have no actual utility in the game (where most of the cards you are adding to your deck let you do things like draw more cards or gain resources). So as you get closer to winning, the composition of your deck becomes worse and worse, and you become less and less likely to be able to purchase more Provinces.
There are certainly games that have negative feedback loops for leading players. Some Ludo variants make it progressively harder for players to make valid moves the more pieces they brought home, for example by forcing the player to move to an empty home field with an exact dice roll.
Generally, I'd say that if you have a game that regularly ends in close finishes it's likely either very random or it contains negative feedback loops.
"Imperial" - the best boardgame of all, in my opinion[1]- largely circumvents having a comeback mechanism by making the game scores being a dynamic result of all player interactions until the very end. You typically only know for sure whos about to win in the last round but (very importantly) it does not feel random at all (there is virtually no luck, no dice, no card decks)
In short, its a light wargame in which the players control the nations - but they are not the nations. They are investors who buy bonds in the nations and the player with most investments controls (governs) that nation. Controls shift during the game and war is _not_ the objective. Profiting from your nation(s) is.
Do check it out. The game is well reviewe and still critically underrated
> Is there a board game where one's advantage doesn't compound, though?
The thing is, it's not usually such a zero-sum game as it is in Monopoly.
In better designed games, there's more opportunity cost associated when you start optimizing for something. Individual players can pursue their own, different strategies. A player who optimizes for "strategy A" might be weak to "strategy B." Getting the resources for "strategy B" might become easier, since there's less competition for them.
The trick to Monopoly is that there is no alternate strategy. Opting to (or being unable to) buy land doesn't open up some other path through which you can win - it just means you're going to lose.
I used to play the MAD (magazine) board game as a kid. It's pretty good. Pretty crazy, not surprisingly. A lil like Monopoly except the pick-up cards involve doing weird things, or telling every player to pass their money to the player on their right or left, which happens so often that you never are winning for too long.
Yes. As others have pointed out, it’s more and more common these days - or at least more common to have a situation where the players aren’t entirely sure who is ahead.
Examples include:
* Innovation
* Wingspan
* 7 Wonders
* Brass: Birmingham (and the original Brass, too)
> Perhaps the most intrigueing meta observation of the monopoly game is how the players seem to never recognise how it is rigged
I don't want to start a big argument, because I realize some people actually do like Monopoly as an artistic statement, but I've always felt that if a game is actually that universally misunderstood, it's not because it's brilliant -- it's because it's bad at demonstrating its core point.
One of the purposes of game design is to communicate something, whether that's an idea or an emotion or whatever. And Monopoly is a bad game at communicating. It doesn't add anything additional to anyone's understanding of Capitalism, it's only decipherable by people who already know what it's trying to say.
I have never, ever seen a child or an adult that was out-of-the-loop on Monopoly's origins walk away from the game saying "huh, that has some interesting parallels to the real world, I should read more about this."
That's because when it was corporatized, they intentionally took out the message. The Landlord's Game became Monopoly. The Poor House became Jail. References to wages and necessity taxes were removed. The anti-monopolist rules were removed entirely.
To be fair, the history of capitalist owners of Monopoly have had reason to "dull" the original design. The Landlord's Game included two rule sets and encouraged players to play both then compare/contrast. The second Georgist rule set hasn't been included in the official rulebook in decades, but was a key part of the original design. (It's intentionally dull to play the other rules, but it was the stark contrast that was a key part of its attempt to be a teaching tool.)
There's also been another force "dulling" Monopoly's game design over time: most people don't learn Monopoly from the rules, they learn Monopoly from playing with others. There are a lot of viral (mimetic) multi-generation "house rules" that people learn from their families/peers/educators. There's also a couple of key clear rules that remain in the rulebook that people don't follow for a number of reasons, including essentially culturally "we forgot them".
(There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism and its attempts at "fairness" band aids in the house rule dialects that have accumulated over time. There's some interesting meta-commentary on Capitalism regulations, banking, and/or dumb luck in the rules that have been "forgotten".)
In some ways, some of the almost willful cultural ignorance of the message of Monopoly is its own ironic statement on the systemic problems of Capitalism and how much people complicit in that system want to wish things fair or ignore their complicity and try to just cope with the problems and their fallout. I wouldn't necessarily call that "universally misunderstood", that's a pretty deep understanding, even if accidental. It's generally surprisingly easy to have conversations about it and "wake" people to Monopoly's origins and what it says about the game (and why they love/hate it) because even if they never thought "huh there are interesting parallels to real world Capitalism here" they can definitely see the parallels in hindsight if you want to talk about it.
Perhaps this was different in the past, back when your entertainment for the evening was just to sit around with a few people, read the rules thoroughly, and concentrate. Perhaps even play it several times.
For the current age I think it takes way too much patience. I think movies have changed like that too, the attention economy demands that you get to the point immediately. Heck, I can't even read articles that don't address their headline within the first three paragraphs.
They've actually done that in a psychology study. As in real life, the people with the advantage start inventing reasons why they deserved that advantage, and that it's really fair.
> I played board games to have fun. Monopoly failed to deliver.
A common sentiment, and yet "Over 250 million sets of Monopoly have been sold since its invention and the game has been played by over half a billion people making it possibly the most popular board game in the world." [1]
Did you read the WP article? It seems the original game had 2 sets of rules:
> The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game.[3] A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake.
So one rules similar to modern day Monopoly. And one that teach us the virtues of "social policies". (can I say socialism here without being down voted to hell?)
And there was a clear intend to teach its players about "unfairness":
> The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate. Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.
I've learned something today!
Also, I'm quite a fan of Georgism (tax bad behavior so heavy it disappears). For instance, I think we should georgize pollution and wealth hoarding.
I don't have a good understanding, but is it actually socialist when it is about increasing personal wealth at the core? It does rather sound like a constrained version of capitalism to me.
Well to be honest there is different versions of socialism with different meanings. Some do put personal wealth as more important, or at least indirectly. If it is part of the market socialism side then wealth is used the same way to promote self-interest.
In market socialism the the difference from capitalism is stricter controls on business ownership (i.e. businesses must be coops or something along those lines).
Socialism tries in increase wealth of individuals, just like capitalism does. The difference is that different flavours of socialism want to increase it across the board, where capitalism wants an individuals wealth to be very well protected, especially when the numbers get high, so that wealth may accumulate in few.
I find it fascinating that the original Monopoly game was desgined to teach us the difference and how Georgism (taxing bad behavior) may be used by "the people/democracy" to ensure capitalism is not the outcome.
Also very telling that the game was thn ripped off, and got popular as Monopoly, where the only set of rules are the capitalistic ones.
I wonder if they've reinvented the game yet to have similar themes (and that glorious fake money) but to improve on the shortcomings of it, mostly the mid - endgame when it's just a lot of going around the board and waiting for rent to come in / other player's money to drain.
Short version: You're _supposed_ to strictly follow the rules AND the lack of pieces. Depleting the bank of houses to upgrade property with as a market cornering tactic. IRL similar to urban growth boundaries and no programs for upgrading the housing within them.
Not necessarily if you follow the "all land must sell on first landing" rule that is often forgotten. (After landing on an unowned square, if you refuse to buy at list price, it must go to auction by the bank [with the bank still collecting the funds].) A smaller starting money supply potentially forces fewer "at list price" purchases and shrewder auction house strategies potentially advantaging auction house strategy over luck of landing on a square and getting that first refusal.
> Set a sensible exchange rate to real money and treat the Monopoly money as “chips”.
Monopoly being not zero sum among the players makes that...interesting. As well as transfers from losing players to the winner, there is also potential for net transfer to or from the bank. How do you handle that?
That's the whole point, yes. You're supposed to hate the banker who has the easiest ability to cheat and thus control the game. There are parallels and metaphors being laid here...
I would read his statement slightly different: In that perspective, the actual game is to cheat and not follow the rules. Everybody should do it, but the banker has an advantage. Thus, everybody hates the banker for having an advantage in the actual cheating game.
I have to say, it's slightly funny to assume a multiplayer game that is entered by all the players with the clear and open intent to not follow the rules of the game.
> the clear and open intent to not follow the rules
it's great to be honest, the only way we played uno was with cheating (if you got caught, you lost the round tho)
it creates a lot of interesting cross round strategies; if you aren't close to victory in one round for example you can hide a good card and save it up for the round, for example. hiding a card or two would get you to uno quicker, but you'd have to play them at some later point or later ruond, and you couldn't win strictly by hiding because once uno is declared your count is fairly visible. but you can strategize and by deciding which card to drop open up more possibilities for matching your last card.
I suggest everyone should try a evening of full on cheating at a luck based game, it's super fun when everyone else is doing it too.
There are several board games that actually have rules that encourage cheating. I specifically remember one where the rule was basically "If you get caught during the turn on which you cheated, you need to pay a minor penalty. If the turn passes before you get caught, then you got away with it."
There’s a reason that Monopoly is ubiquitously disliked by almost all board gamers. It’s become the game that many people associate with the hobby. This is so far from the truth.
Fascintating piece of history. The inspiration behind the game Monopoly was an attempt to educate people on the immoral nature of the current landownership paradigm. But interestingly, it is based on the same original classical liberal arguments that spawned free market philosophy.
I am seeing bus stop ads here in Sydney with a tagline from a BTC exchange saying something like "If you're seeing bitcoin on a billboard, it's time to buy".
Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.
Definitely true. During the big silver run a few years ago, the owner of a local Lebanese restaurant made an investment in a solid silver statue of his late dog. That was the sign of the near peak.
I think crypto has plenty of run left. It’s still a pain to buy. When your dentist is loading up his 401k with Bitcoin ETFs, that’s going to be the peak.
Reminds me of a billboard I saw in the London tube once, with the big bold title "BEAT THE CROWDS" over a photo of lots of people crowded uncomfortably together on the platform. I wasn't sure if it was encouraging people to get up early and commute to their jobs, or to get a job with the police hitting lots of people with billy clubs. Either way, it was about crowd control.
> Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.
My stripper friends first started asking me if they should buy cryptocurrencies in 2017. Had you bought btc at the $17k it was priced then, you'd have more than tripled your money in the following four years.
Well now, sex workers were early adopters of crypto across the board. I don't think that's an example of the 'cabbie rule', they were probably more interested in the technology than most who buy.
>the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.
>If your cabbie understands BTC you might have a point. We aren't even close to there yet
The point is that the cabbie likely doesn't understand BTC. When an asset class becomes so popular that people who have no idea how it works are putting money into it and loudly campaigning for others to do the same that is a sign that you are in a bubble.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the bubble is about to pop. Some bubbles can last decades. See real estate in a variety of locations around the world as an example. However lot of dumb money (people who don't understand what they're buying) flowing into a thing because of fomo can be a predictor that prices are unsustainable.
"When an asset class becomes so popular that people who have no idea how it works are putting money into it and loudly campaigning for others to do the same that is a sign that you are in a bubble."
It absolutely isn't a sign a of a bubble. There aren't many people that understand what they are investing in be it currency or Google.
The success of the investment has nothing to do with the cabbies understanding. Taking his advice does.
Understanding doesn't come into this. Most people don't understand money any farther than $5 + $5 = $10, and it still works really well. Unlike bitcoin.
Someone's working in both cases. In the case of inheritance it's the person who gave the money in their will. That person also already paid tax when they earned the money in the first place.
If anything I think we should encourage rich people to give their money away (even if only to their children) since wealth consumed by a broader number of people leads to more happiness than if it's all consumed by one person. It's better for a $10 million fortune to be spent by 10 consecutive generations than for it to all be spent by the original owner.
> If anything I think we should encourage rich people to give their money away (even if only to their children) since wealth consumed by a broader number of people leads to more happiness than if it's all consumed by one person. It's better for a $10 million fortune to be spent by 10 consecutive generations than for it to all be spent by the original owner.
I don't understand how you reach this conclusion. If the original owner spends all of it it enters a whole lot of more peoples pockets than his kids.
Many places in the world you pay a tax for inheritance.
For 100% (or otherwise significant) inheritance tax, the issue is how to implement it. If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die. If gifts are also 100% taxed, you sell your property to them (and then spring up a company and hire them to do "work", so they get the money back). If sale of property and work are 100% taxed, well, it's a very different kind of economy.
100% inheritance tax only hurts when someone dies unexpectedly. Others will be prepared with workarounds.
Where I live, both inheritance and gifts are taxed with very similar rates. Also, selling things under their market value is considered gifting (which sometimes gets interesting, for obvious reasons).
This is something I've certainly thought about, as another proponent of as-high-as-possible inheritance taxes.
What about taking inheritance and gifts as ordinary income to the recipient? Ideally this would be coupled with a reform on capital gains tax, but even as is, should target high taxes only on large amounts or amounts given to people that are already rich.
There would certainly need to be some tweaks, but it should diminish the inherent injustice of inheritance.
> If you know it's happening, you'll just gift what you own to the preferred recipients before you die.
You can treat all gifts a year or less before the date of death as inheritance. Many wealthy parents will be hesitant to give large amounts of money to children while in good health, as they're scared children won't care about them any more once they get their money.
Because we do not want to isolate children from their parents. A 100% inheritance tax is impossible from a practical standpoint.
>One person gets something for free,
Do you abandon your child as soon as it is born? Do you think your newborn should work and pay the bills?
No, you support it for 18 years and let it grow as much as possible instead of considering your child something to be exploited for money.
> the other works and has to pay tax?
If you inherit something from someone, that person had to work and pay tax.
I can come up with good reasons for wealth taxes, I can come up with good reasons for abolishment of land ownership (replaced by a permanent lease model) or heavy taxation of land but I honestly cannot come up with any reason for inheritance taxes beyond jealousy, jealousy that other people had more fortunate parents than you and your selfish desire to drag them down. If everyone started off on an empty earth it would be fair, but it also would be equally bad for everyone, instead of bad for an unlucky minority. Being poor in the US is a blessing, being poor in India is not.
Especially when there is a fair solution to the wealth inequality problem. Simply split the wealth instead of giving it all to the first born son. If people are obscenely wealthy, let them have many children and let each of those children be less wealthy than their parents. If you must implement this with a tax, then set a maximum amount that a single person can receive through inheritance in a lifetime, say $1 billion and tax anything after that. Yes, that means Jeff Bezos will have to find 200 heirs or lose the money to the state. It would be in his best interest to reduce wealth inequality at the end of his life.
You went from “I cannot think of any reason for inheritance tax” to ... proposing an inheritance tax (at a very high threshold) in the space of a paragraph.
Untaxed inheritance perpetuates inequality. Inequalities are unfair and arguably damage our societies. Functioning societies aim to repair the damage by rebalancing structural inequalities. Hence inheritance tax. The children of the very wealthy aren’t being “abandoned”, they already have surpassing advantages while their parents are alive.
Well if you want to ask why inheritance is moral you should probably also ask why taxes are moral because taxing/abolishing inheritance is a logical extension to that. I urge us all to sit and think about it for a few moments. What are the logical steps and sequence of justifications that led us from a bunch of random people in the middle of nowhere to a point where there is now an entity that [forceably] takes X% of people's labor, by virtue of birth in that entity's area and nothing else? If government didn't have this "aura" of legitimacy and "democracy" attached to it, what it does would be seen as no different to what lords did to their peasants centuries ago. By virtue of a peasant being born on a lord's land, they were subject to their rules. At least back then they could probably leave and go to the middle of nowhere and be left alone if you weren't harming anyone. These days there is nowhere to go, and in some cases the "government" might not even let you leave!
Centuries from now they'll probably consider what we're doing now to be absolutely barbaric and adjacent to plain old slavery.
I'll bite. Governments are virtual machines, aka language runtimes, they provide a baseline for human cooperation by creating the rule of law and a political environment within which an advanced economy can exist. They can only provide these things because they conquered land via a military and protect the land and its citizens from intruders.
You can argue that there are ways of taxation that are compatible with this idea and there are ways of taxation that are counterproductive but you cannot argue that the taxes shouldn't exist because that would mean no government which would mean no rule of law and no political environment in which an advanced economy can exist. Of course, the big problem is that many governments fail to live up to their responsibility. The US and EU countries' government may be failing their citizens, but not as much as many Asian, African or Latin American governments.
Taxes are moral because taxes fund the society which allows us to live. You can debate about the level of taxation, what to tax (labour vs capital vs natural assets) and what functions that society should provide, but there are very few people claiming that national defense, or courts, or city streets, should not be funded from the public purse.
Reading your logic here one would think that your musings have lead you to become an anti-capitalist but for some reason this texts strikes me as if it was written by somebody who's far from that position.
In the UK pro-inheritance folks like to call it a "death tax" and argue it'll rob people of the ability to pass things along to their children. The debate is caustic and unpleasant to say the least.
Something a lot of commenters seem to be missing is that in Adam Smith's time, inheritance meant primogeniture. In other words, the eldest son receives all land, which is indivisible and belongs to the eldest son only. (Who is socially obliged to support the other people in the family as needed.)
This ties up a lot of wealth in ways which slow down economic growth immensely.
“Immoral” is one dimension, but more importantly it’s to educate on the failure-prone nature of land ownership. It causes markets to seize up and capital to flow to rent seekers and away from those who deploy capital (capitalists) or generate it (laborers).
Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story is a fun documentary that talks about origin of the game, including The Landlord’s Game, and also includes a fair amount of coverage of a national and international tournament.
I would have liked it to dwell more on the roots and the meta-level of what the game is trying to say, and how that seems to be missed by most people who play it. But was still a fun watch on a lazy weekend day.
Anyone in Australia interested in Georgism should check out http://www.prosper.org.au ... I first learned about the landlords game and the origins of monopoly chatting with them :)
Every time this comes up I wonder whether the Landlord's Game can be played with a regular Monopoly set. Is it just the rules that have changed, or did the original game also contain different pieces/cards?
Yes, I wonder the same... The wikipedia article points to landlordsgame.info. Thereyou can also see a picture with all the cards and chips that came with it. It seems a lot. But there is no complete, printable copy of them: http://landlordsgame.info/games/lg-1906/images/lg-1906_egc-p...
It’s curious that Lizzie Magie chose a price-to-rent ratio of 10 [1] for the first version of The Landlord’s Game, wonder if that would have been typical for US real estate in 1904. The same ratio today would be unusually landlord-friendly. [2]
Or buyer friendly, presumably. You can't tell which based on the ratio, surely.
>The 2018 median home value in San Francisco was $1,195,700, and the median annual rent was $22,560.//
So it's probably comparing cheap rental properties with expensive owner-occupied properties? That's likely not very useful as a statistic on it's own unless you've got the distribution of both. Better would be making a comparison of the rental price (including charges) vs TCO of ownership for directly comparable properties -- that would be a lot of work.
FWIW 10x price-to-rent isn't far off right in my area of my city in the UK. Houses prices and rental prices are high compared to wages, IMO.
For anyone curious about the philosophy behind this game, known variously as Georgism or Geoism, a decent review of the principle text, Progress & Poverty, was just posted on Astral Codex Ten:
I will take a look at this. But in the past, my (meager) attempts at understanding Georgism have not been very successful.
I'd love to see some examples of what specific laws would be implemented, what taxation would look like (in actual percentages and dollar amounts) and things like that to understand what a system could look like in action.
"The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes such as on income, trade, or purchases that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend."
There's a lot of different forms, and much like Pigoivian taxes that are intended to offset negative externalities, it can be hard to exactly find the right number. But even if one doesn't know the exact number, be it land rent or negative externality, getting closer than the arbitrary $0 can provide improvements.
For real estate, at the optimum land rent, land would exchange hands at a value of roughly $0 (structures on top of the land would modify the total property value). Given the high transaction costs of land, and of changing ownership, there are other forces that shift the true land price away from $0 under a full LVT.
There would need to be exemptions or other ameliorating of the coercive effects of full-land-rent LVT for those living in a primary residence. Nobody wants to force grannies out of their homes, for example. But the coercive effect of land taxation would otherwise mean that land would be used far more productively, with more stable prices and above all more affordable prices. It would also require getting rid of density restrictions that are not based in actual health and safety (ie pretty much all of them). But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.
It doesn't take many homeowners to completely shut off the market for land and corner it all. Not many people watch zoning boards, and fewer pay attention to how limited land use is, and even fewer who are in power do not directly benefit by the massive bubble on land prices.
And we really do have a massive bubble on land prices due to rentierism. So any sane deflation is going to require a gradual phase-in of an LVT, with probably 2+ decades of gentle deflation of land prices. And as soon as that starts in, there are the makings of a tax revolt. In California, we have been suffering from the tax revolt of Prop 13 for 50 years, and we are barely seeing any cracks in the army of anti-tax Prop 13 supporters.
So the politics of a full LVT are extreme, especially in a land where every middle class person is supposed to own a bit of land and defend it like a castle, and often when that defense means stopping any change. A full-on LVT is meant precisely to stop land hoarding, so as long as a majority of people see that land is theirs' to hoard, it's unlikely that an LVT will be passed. Unless imposed from in high by a technocratic elite that's trying to maximize social benefit, rather than individuals looking only to maximize their sole benefit.
Edit: I phrased something very very poorly in my comment: "But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.". This should instead say that small changes in density can allow less land accomplish far more use. The entire idea is to make sure that land is not wasted, which means that humans will use less land overall, and will let more of it stay as nature.
No, the anti-pattern is sprawl and living far from other people, impacting huge amounts of land at low density.
Look at any suburb in satellite view, and see how much area it takes to get to, say, 40 houses. Compare that to a standard apartment complex with park space. Now add in all the roads that are needed to service the suburban detached housing, which requires driving for every single trip be it kids going to school or picking up some groceries. Then all the extra insulation, building materials, roofing, needed to create housing that is still far less energy efficient to heat and cool than an apartment building.
There are two efficient living forms: 1) urban life where needs are mostly within walking distance (be it a town of 5,000 or 500,000 or 5,000,000), and 2) isolated farm life where you only go into town infrequently because it takes too long, and you're kids take the bus.
Suburban living promotes daily driving for every task. Check out this map of consumption-based carbon emissions, which roughly track with most other pollution:
Do you have numbers on that? The last time I looked it up, over here at least, that wasn't really the case. It seemed that while people in cities use less energy on personal transportation and housing, they consume much more goods and services than people in rural areas.
Apparently the answer is in the rule book as well (from the WP article):
"The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game. A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake."
Let's say you have a current property worth $1,000,000. 75% of the value is unimproved land, 25% is the capital improvements (house etc.) It's being rented out at $40,000 a year ($3,333 a month). 75% of the rent is economic rent of the unimproved value of the land, 25% is for the house.
So a 1% land value tax would be $10,000 a year. A 3% LVT would eat up the entirety of the economic rent.
However, the yield on that property would go down from 4% per annum to 1% per annum, so the value of the land would drop.
Any politically realistic implementation would involve progressively increasing the LVT and reducing other taxes over time, so the first year might be 1% LVT, but eventually the price of the property would drop such that a 100% LVT wouldn't be unreasonable (although an 85% LVT or thereabouts is often thought to work better).
Georgism is a pigovian tax on individual land ownership and rent collection. It would reduce or remove taxes arising from labor or capital entrepreneurship, and purely tax the zero-value-add rent collected by the "landed gentry".
Actual percentages and dollar amounts is impossible to give in general, but the basic idea is that returns to pure ownership of land (without improvements) should approach zero. This should eliminate the risk-free speculative ownership of empty lots downtown that are just waiting to cash out on rising land prices due to improvements made by other capitalists and collected taxes.
> Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent... Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair and equitable.
Take out "natural" and it seems like any non-inflationary cryptocurrency would be a target for a Georgist tax.
Treat "carbon budget" as a natural resource and you've invented a carbon tax.
Georgism just makes so much sense because if "mother nature" (or "natural capital", if you want to sound less hippie) is not charging for the things we take from it, then we're basically stealing from it. Even if you're a hardcore capitalist, you have to agree that it's not truly capitalism if it's all based on stealing from the largest provider in the system.
A while ago (1999) I made a "Micropoly" board game about the Microsoft Monopoly, with cards for various dot-com companies (Copyleft (L) 1999 Free Monopoly Foundation), using an xml file to define the cards and board and an ugly Perl script to render them with PostScript!
>Update: I've written an ugly "openopoly.pl" Perl script, and a "micropoly.xml" data file, that describes the specifics of the game. The Perl script reads in and parses the XML database, and writes out PostScript and HTML to render the graphics and web pages. It embeds EPS files with images and cartoons in the PostScript file, and then runs it all through GhostScript, to render out PDF and JPG files with the printable images of the board. It currently writes out one HTML file with links to the small and large pictures of all the property cards, and soon it will write out a web page for each property, and link them all together, as well as an image map for the entire board. Most of the logos, cartoons, and other graphics haven't been put in yet, but the basic functionality for producing the game is there. This is work in progress, but here's a preview of the automatically generated web page index of properties, the full sized board micropoly-board-whole.pdf [1,672k], the paginated board micropoly-board-split.pdf [10,028k, sorry but I'll optimize the PostScript not to draw clipped images and it will reduce in size], and the printable cards micropoly-cards.pdf [5087k], as well as the micropoly.xml file from which it was all generated.
The idea (which I never finished but encourage anyone else to pick up and run with) was to develop a fully skinnable parametrizable Monopoly compatible game template (or variants like Anti-Monopoly), that you could print out and glue onto cardboard, or even play online!
Monopoly is essentially the original "Open Source Game" designed by Elizabeth Magie and shared among Atlantic City Quakers. Then it was illegitimately taken over and patented by a giant corporation. Parker Brothers' story about Charles Darrow was marketing bullshit.
>Also in the 1970s, Professor Ralph Anspach, who had himself published a board game intended to illustrate the principles of both monopolies and trust busting, fought Parker Brothers and its then parent company, General Mills, over the copyright and trademarks of the Monopoly board game. Through the research of Anspach and others, much of the early history of the game was "rediscovered" and entered into official United States court records. Because of the lengthy court process, including appeals, the legal status of Parker Brothers' copyright and trademarks on the game was not settled until 1985. The game's name remains a registered trademark of Parker Brothers, as do its specific design elements; other elements of the game are still protected under copyright law. At the conclusion of the court case, the game's logo and graphic design elements became part of a larger Monopoly brand, licensed by Parker Brothers' parent companies onto a variety of items through the present day. Despite the "rediscovery" of the board game's early history in the 1970s and 1980s, and several books and journal articles on the subject, Hasbro (Parker Brothers' current parent company) did not acknowledge any of the game's history before Charles Darrow on its official Monopoly website as recently as June 2012. Nor did Hasbro acknowledge anyone other than Darrow in materials published or sponsored by them, at least as recently as 2009.
I can't remember one game that didn't feature (a) disputes about rules and the administration of the bank; (b) animosity and dissatisfaction upon exit; and (c) hollow emptiness for the (newly friendless)"winner".