Monopoly History This is one of a number of sites which describes the history of the board game Monopoly. It doesn’t get it quite right, but is directionally correct. I’ll share my corrections here:

  1. “Goal” is actually “Gaol” – what we know as Jail.
  2. The “Prosperity” rules were not similar to the rules of the Monopoly game as we know it. Rather, they were similar to the original rules, which produced a VERY dull game. No big winners, no losers. Just a sustainable situation in which all could prosper. Not much fun on a Sunday afternoon, but a good model for real life. The OTHER rules are similar to the Monopoly game we know today.

The point of “The Landlord’s Game” – Lizzie Magie’s original 1903 game – was to teach the ideas of Henry George (1839-1897), and show by a simulation why they produced a just, logical, sustainable economy and community, in which all could live as equals. George saw that the economic rent – the annual rental value of the land within a community’s borders – ought to be collected by the community and used to fund goods and services which would benefit the community, while that which individuals and corporations create should be the private property of those individuals and corporations. The game demonstrated how things would work under this scenario. (Think about SimCity as a teaching tool.)

This website is missing the richest part of the story!

You might appreciate these two pages:

The Landlord’s Game and Prosperity, at https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5SHdsI4Ysi_ODQ4Y2FjZWMtNGFkMS00ZjZkLWFhNzYtMjNkNjFjMDJiZGE3&hl=en_GB

and the 1923 patent application, at http://www.google.com/patents?pg=PA1&zoom=4&id=lD1cAAAAEBAJ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

I’ll post more on the subject over time.