Monopoly: The game of cumulative advantage
By Tim Bearly
Reader Contributor
“For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” — Matthew 25:29
Like countless other children, my friends and I spent many afternoons in our youth playing board games like Monopoly. Personally, I was always a bit more fond of Risk (a game that was a bit more forthright about its ambitions for world domination); nevertheless, Monopoly was always one of my favorites.
Looking back, the early stages of the game were always the most fun: properties could still be purchased, rent was manageable and no one yet knew which player would emerge as the game’s next real estate baron. For a brief moment, it felt like the American Dream — like everyone had a “chance.” A few laps around the board, however, and it became clear that things were beginning to change.
The phenomenon known as the Matthew Effect, named after the preceding biblical passage from the book of Matthew, was beginning to rear its ugly head. The player who acquired the first few valuable properties gained an advantage, and that advantage began to compound. Before long, success was no longer just about the roll of the dice; it was about owning the spaces on which everyone else was forced to land. Ultimately, a feedback loop was established, and it essentially became a mathematical certainty who would win the game and who would be left wanting to flip the board over with righteous indignation.
Of course, as young lads, we didn’t realize any of this. Rather, if one of us was winning, we’d arrogantly rub it into the other players: “We make our own destiny!” Conversely, if we lost, we’d lament, “This game is all luck!”
But this isn’t just about our tendency to look for internal causes for our wins and external causes for our losses. This is about the process of cumulative advantage.
Comparatively, I am one of the lucky ones. I own a home; and, because I own a home, I have been able to build equity. Though I’d like to believe that my sterling qualities alone account for this, I must face reality: I was lucky enough to buy a home in 2016, when homes were much more affordable. Were I attempting to buy the same house today, I would not have the means to do so. Rather than simply telling the youth to “bootstrap” like I did, I prefer to be honest about my fortuitous circumstances. People who cannot afford to buy homes already have enough contempt for us homeowners; the last thing they want to hear from us is, “You have only yourselves to blame.”
The emphasis on personal responsibility is certainly an important component of the success of individuals and societies. However, what is often omitted, particularly by members of the Christian right (who don’t always share Jesus’ love for the poor), is collective responsibility. Leaving people to the mercy of the marketplace when it comes to things like housing and health care isn’t working out too well for many Americans. How much we choose to simply blame people as individuals, and how much we are willing to look at the systems and institutions that play a role in fostering inequality, depends greatly on how willing we are to break free from tribal dogma about capitalism and socialism and critically examine these complex economic issues.
The more we allow wealth to accumulate in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of individuals and corporations, the more we risk creating a society where our labor exists primarily to generate passive income for those who already have substantial wealth.
For decades, we have been told that wealth will “trickle down” as we continue to enact tax cuts for the wealthy. Yet, coupled with deregulation and other policy changes, these tax cuts have only served to increase the concentration of wealth. That concentration, in turn, reinforces the very mechanism at the heart of the Matthew Effect: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Reactionaries, particularly the market fundamentalists who wax nostalgic about the glory days of America, often hesitate to mention that during what is commonly called the Golden Age of Capitalism — from the 1940s through the 1970s — the top marginal tax rate was much higher than it is today. From 1954 to 1963, it stood at 91%. The era was also marked by strong labor unions, rising wages, substantial public investment and a distribution of wealth that would make heads explode on Fox News. No wonder the Baby Boomers love capitalism so much: The capitalism they grew up with was laced with just the right amount of “socialism” — at least, what they would later come to call socialism.
The solution to the economic problems we face involves a more nuanced, less binary examination of capitalism and socialism. Those who love and benefit from capitalism the most should be the ones advocating for at least some degree of regulatory intervention, because history has shown — from the French to the Bolshevik revolutions — that in politics for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, much like Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this. He recognized that if capitalism was going to survive, it had to work for all people, not just a select few. The New Deal was not a communist plot to abolish capitalism; it was an attempt to save capitalism from itself, to curb its excesses and address the conditions that threatened to undermine it. To avoid an American version of the Russian Revolution, the New Deal sought to preserve capitalism by regulating it.
For the past few decades, however, we have been moving in the opposite direction, and the results are being witnessed every day. The carrot-and-stick promise of trickle-down economics is being exposed for what it is: a ruse, nothing more.
We need to stop merely blaming the youth for having a more favorable view of socialism and start asking about the material conditions that have led them to such a view in the first place.
The game of Monopoly was based on a board game called The Landlord’s Game, which was invented more than 100 years ago by activist Elizabeth Magie. Her goal, rather than creating a playbook for real estate moguls, was to demonstrate how the accumulation of property creates a cycle of increasing advantage for those who own it and increasing dependence for those who do not.
Like Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Magie’s game reflected a deep understanding of how systems can shape the lives and behavior of the people living within them. Regrettably, it could be argued that neither Magie nor Orwell fully achieved their goal of enlightening the populace. People read Orwell, play Monopoly and recognize the systems being described to them. Then they get back to their daily lives as though it’s all just make-believe.
There’s the rub. We can be exposed to great insight, hear the warning, read the words, and receive the message, and still fail to act on it. Perhaps we have been too deeply indoctrinated by those in power, too convinced that government is the problem and, ergo, cannot be part of the solution, and too invested in the comforting myth of meritocracy to recognize the change that needs to occur.
Tim Bearly is a writer and musician from Sandpoint who draws inspiration from George Orwell’s words, “I write because there is some lie that I want to expose.”
