There's Nothing Free Market About the Board Game Monopoly | Hacker News Reader

There's Nothing Free Market About the Board Game Monopoly

reason.com

18 pointswebmaven10 comments

This is a very weird article. It should have been trivial to argue against Turner's tweet, because obviously a board game is not real economics. Instead, the author lands on "actually, Monopoly games take a long time" as a good argument to include. I wonder if the author knows that this happens because people add a wealth-redistributing "Free Parking" house rule?

That rule is designed to shorten the game.

Regardless of whether it's designed to shorten the game, it lengthens it significantly. Monopoly only ends when enough money leaves the economy. With the free parking lottery a LOT less money leaves the economy, leading to extended play time.

> Monopoly only ends when enough money leaves the economy.

Not true. Monopoly ends when one player can take money from others faster than they can accumulate it. There can still be net money into the players, just not net money in to most of the players.

Not to mention the UBI of “passing go”

As it turns out, a childrens board game does not actually make strong arguments about complex economic theories

To make monopoly a lot more fun, every time someone lands on an unowned property, go to auction. It means people are engaged almost every turn.

I want to say this is actually the default rules? We didn’t play it this way growing up but I think every electronic version of Monopoly I have played (and I’ve played a number of them since I’ve always loved the game) does that. Some don’t even let you disable it.

Sort of. The default rules allow the player who landed on the property to buy it first. If they refuse then it goes to auction. When you make auctions the only way to buy property things get interesting.

I had been losing sleep over that...

Not quite fifty years ago, a girlfriend who then was more "liberal" than I was, gave me the board game "Anti-Monopoly" as a birthday present. I had arrived at a stage of disliking board games, so we never played it.

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