09-05-2024
For many of us, our first experience of the triumphs of free enterprise came huddled around a Monopoly board. Since Parker Brothers introduced Monopoly in 1935, it has become a gaming icon, selling more than 275 million copies.
Yet, the story of Monopoly’s origins reveals it to be more than just a game. The game we recognize as Monopoly was patented in 1904 as “The Landlord’s Game” by a dynamic woman, Lizzie Magie. She developed the game to educate on the value of Henry George’s economics, and the game spread as a free, handmade item. A major figure in political economics during the Gilded Age, George was the author of the highly popular and respected book, Progress and Poverty. In it, he argued that the driver of inequality was land speculation, which forced up rents. His solution was to tax land at 100% — the “Single Tax” — eliminating the need for all other taxes and making land accessible for the use of all.
Magie designed her game to show how the purchase and holding of land drove up rents, leading to success for only one player. In other words, the point of the game was not for one person to win but for everyone to realize that all the other players inevitably lose. Players were then supposed to play using an alternative, Single Tax rule set. Property (i.e., land) rents were no longer paid to the player who owned that property but instead were paid into the public treasury and used to buy into public ownership the utility spaces, the railroads, and two of the no trespassing spaces, which become free colleges. Wages upon passing “Go” would also increase. When a player named Charles Darrow sold the game to Parker Brothers as his own invention in 1935, this alternative rule set was removed from the game.
Today, Monopoly can still be a teaching tool. In Cornerstone for Business, I teach the foundations of economic thought and social organization to Daniels School of Business students. Games like Monopoly and the earlier Landlord’s Game allow students to “play out” the ideas of great works, including Plato’s Republic on whether injustice pays, Locke’s Second Treatise on property rights, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto on state ownership. In the wider world, Michigan is considering adopting a land taxation system based on Single Tax principles to solve the problem of derelict property in Detroit, and large tech platforms have prompted renewed regulatory interest over the existence of monopolies. Not only the game, but its instructive spirit, lives on today.
Rhodes Pinto is an assistant teaching professor in the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program at Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. His main area of focus is ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and science, with additional interests in the later history of Western philosophy, in Eastern philosophy, and in Greek and Latin literature. At Purdue he currently teaches the Transformative Texts I (SCLA 101) course of Cornerstone for Business.
