Interesting. He may be right about Monopoly not appealing to board game geeks, but I wonder if he's missing out on ordinary people's fantasies of being property tycoons. I used to think Monopoly was invented by an American Marxist with the idea of proving that capitalism was inherently unstable, thanks to the phenomenon of increasing returns to scale, which you can see here
- each house costs the same, but as you build more houses, the expected payback to each increases - which is often more in more in line with the real world than the hypotheses of neo-classical economics. That it results in a very uneven distribution of wealth can be demonstrated mathematically, but with Monopoly, you act it out.
However, just checking my facts, I discovered that the commercial game was a rip off from an older game inspired by a non Marxist strand of economics, whose developers, in a more open source way, developed something called The Landlords' Game to simulate how an economy would work, but including a system of taxation
Magie designed the game 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.
Source here
Again
according to Wikipedia
The main Georgist policy tool is a fee assessed on location value, commonly called a land value tax (LVT).
an idea which is still knocking around. I
referred to it in this thread
Disappointingly for any Marxists out there, along came FDR, to demonstrate that through government intervention, liberal society does not have to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
