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The Landlord's Game - A Lesson in Economic Populism
Tonight I heard a really good segment on NPR's "Only a Game" it wasn't about sports but rather the origins of the Parker Bros. game Monopoly. I knew some of what I heard but I dug a little deeper and decided to share it here.
History is filled with surprising stories of how people and ideas are connected. One such story is that of the origins of the most popular board game in modern history. It's an American classic: each new generation of Monopoly players learns to love (harmlessly) indulging its cutthroat, ruthless, greedy impulses. Players begin the game as equals. Luck — and a bit of strategy — eventually enables one player to dominate all others. That player ends up amassing a huge fortune in cash and real estate. Most Monopoly players don't know (or care) that this game was originally the product of a passion for social and economic justice. In the late 1800s, a young woman named Elizabeth Magie was introduced to the writings of Henry George by her father. She eventually became one of many people who took on the task of trying to teach others what she had learned from studying Progress and Poverty and George's other works.
What's crazy is that we all have played this game, and I'm sure some of us rather vigorously in my family we can't even play because we all have our vices... My cousin always hid a $500 under the board he could get to in a pinch, my niece loved the "free parking" rule which turns out isn't even a thing, and my sister just loved trying to auction properties to get people to pay way over market value. Sure seems like it's human nature to try to game the system, huh? Cheating aside what's interesting is the economic model it teaches us, essentially that the system is rigged and the only way to win is to become a monopoly and control everything.
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Here are some highlights from the interview on NPR with Mary Pilon author of "The Monopolists", and a link to the full article/recording at link.
KG: Well the real story — and I’m going to try to get it right: Charles Darrow actually copied the game from some friends who had played the game with fellow Quakers who had learned the game from a couple of guys who had played in college, completely unaware that the whole thing traced back to a woman named Lizzie Magie.
MP: Correct, that’s very good. The game actually originated with a woman in 1904, long before, obviously, the Great Depression. She received a patent for her “Landlord’s Game” in 1904 and from there the game just becomes very popular among a who’s-who of left wing America. It’s much more of a folk game, so people adapt it and modify it.
KG: When Parker Brothers bought the game from Charles Darrow for $7,000-plus residuals in 1935, they probably didn’t know the game was already 30 years old. But the company immediately set out to create this paper trail that would establish the work as Darrow’s. Why were they so paranoid?
MP: Well I think that it’s important to remember when we look at all of this history — including Lizzie Magie and the early players — that nobody knew they were sitting on a blockbuster and a thing that we would still be talking about, you know, all this time later. So they tried to buy up other versions of the game because Darrow wasn’t the first person who tried to sell the game on his own.
You know, obviously Lizzie Magie had sold her “Landlord’s Game;” there was the guy named Dan Lehman who sold a game called “Finance;” there was a guy named Rudy Copeland who’d sold a game called “Inflation” out of Texas. So there were other versions of the game on the market and their rival, Milton Bradley, actually had a game called “Easy Money.”
KG: We might never have known this story if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State. He sued for the right to produce his own game, called “Anti-Monopoly,” and spent a decade hunting down everyone who had played the game before Darrow “invented” it. I have to think though, some of his quest had to be due to his own curiosity.
Browse All Of OAG’s Featured Books, In One Place
MP: Absolutely. I mean Ralph, before this, he was very politically motivated — ironically, a lot like how Lizzie Magie was. And he was very involved in the anti-war movement, which was obviously a big focal point in the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He himself had fled Danzig shortly before Hitler claimed power and then came to the U.S. as an immigrant. So he had this pattern, in his own life, of fighting for things. His sense of purpose with this case was so dead-on the entire time in a way that it took me a long time to kind of think about that and report that out.
MP: Correct, that’s very good. The game actually originated with a woman in 1904, long before, obviously, the Great Depression. She received a patent for her “Landlord’s Game” in 1904 and from there the game just becomes very popular among a who’s-who of left wing America. It’s much more of a folk game, so people adapt it and modify it.
KG: When Parker Brothers bought the game from Charles Darrow for $7,000-plus residuals in 1935, they probably didn’t know the game was already 30 years old. But the company immediately set out to create this paper trail that would establish the work as Darrow’s. Why were they so paranoid?
MP: Well I think that it’s important to remember when we look at all of this history — including Lizzie Magie and the early players — that nobody knew they were sitting on a blockbuster and a thing that we would still be talking about, you know, all this time later. So they tried to buy up other versions of the game because Darrow wasn’t the first person who tried to sell the game on his own.
You know, obviously Lizzie Magie had sold her “Landlord’s Game;” there was the guy named Dan Lehman who sold a game called “Finance;” there was a guy named Rudy Copeland who’d sold a game called “Inflation” out of Texas. So there were other versions of the game on the market and their rival, Milton Bradley, actually had a game called “Easy Money.”
KG: We might never have known this story if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State. He sued for the right to produce his own game, called “Anti-Monopoly,” and spent a decade hunting down everyone who had played the game before Darrow “invented” it. I have to think though, some of his quest had to be due to his own curiosity.
Browse All Of OAG’s Featured Books, In One Place
MP: Absolutely. I mean Ralph, before this, he was very politically motivated — ironically, a lot like how Lizzie Magie was. And he was very involved in the anti-war movement, which was obviously a big focal point in the Bay Area in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He himself had fled Danzig shortly before Hitler claimed power and then came to the U.S. as an immigrant. So he had this pattern, in his own life, of fighting for things. His sense of purpose with this case was so dead-on the entire time in a way that it took me a long time to kind of think about that and report that out.
Here is a link to an excerpt from the book, I think I might pick it up it looks a like a fun read and sure gives us something to think about especially with the move towards more populist politics.
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Thanks for posting.
Hey, I recognize that skyline in your sigline!
Soon we will be seeing quite a bit more of the Citgo sign...
But for now it's a frozen wasteland.
