Dev.SN

Adapting Monopoly to Understand Modern Money

posted by Dopefish on Saturday March 01 2014, @10:30AM   
from the pass-go-and-collect-$200 dept.

buswolley writes:

"Is the United States or the EU really too poor to afford to build the things each needs to maintain prosperous nations? Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) posits that America is not too poor in real resources to do the things it needs to do, and now proponents of the theory have adapted the rules of the classic board game Monopoly to demonstrate their case. For those that do not know what modern monetary theory is about, a suitable primer on the topic might be Warren Mosler's Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economy Policy or Diagrams and Dollars, either as a book on Amazon or on-line for free at NewEconomicsPerspectives.org.

While the Modern Monetary Theory perspective tends to elicit disbelief and even rage, I think it is important for any scientist and geek to weigh the evidence carefully, and by doing so understand better about how and why money is created and destroyed."

• Re:May be bad example Re:May be bad example (Score: 4, Interesting) by TheRaven on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:46PM

  by TheRaven (270) on Saturday March 01 2014, @12:46PM (#9156) Journal

  The original rules to Monopoly demonstrate that unrestricted capitalism does eventually converge to the point of all assets being held by a single individual (and more quickly to a small group). This is a well-known flaw with the system: when your income is related to the amount capital that you control not the work that you do, then obviously people with large amounts of income from capital will be able to control increasing amounts of capital, gaining more income, and thus controlling more capital, and so on.

  The Monopoly game is somewhat simplified, in that it assumes that there are no disruptive technologies. For example, the invention of steam power redistributed wealth a bit, as it made enormous profits for people who invested early, but by the middle of the industrial revolution things had stabilised, just with a slightly different membership of the capital-controlling class.

  In case you didn't notice, in the USA, 1% of the population controls 34.6% of the capital [wikipedia.org], and 5% controls 61.9%. The bottom 60% of the population, between them, controls 4.2% of the total capital. And guess which way rent is flowing...

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• Re:May be bad example (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01 2014, @03:19PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 01 2014, @03:19PM (#9195)

  The original rules of Monopoly do no such thing. It's a board game. You have to move every turn, you have zero choice in where to go, you have to pay rent if you accidentally land on someone else's property... there are so many ways in which this isn't like real life.

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