Skeptic March 2020

Monopoly

and Monopolies

What Board Games Teach Us About Capitalism

and How to Modify It

BYJONATHAN KAY

22SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 1 2020

Imagine that you are in the late stages of a game

of Monopoly, battling it out against a lone remaining

opponent. You each control a bunch of expensive

properties, all loaded with hotels. Both of you also are

cash-poor, with no spare properties left to mortgage.

Every roll of the dice carries high stakes. If your oppo-

nent lands on one of your hotels, the only way he can

pay the rent will be to sell off his own hotels at a 50-

percent discount (because that is how the rules of Mo-

nopolywork), and vice versa. This means that the first

player who lands on an opponent’s hotel will not just

lose a lot of money: He will also lose the assets he

needs to earn that money back. In real life, the analogy

would be the poor worker in Victorian Britain who,

unable to pay a small debt, goes to debtor’s prison,

which further compromises his ability to earn a liveli-

hood, and so pushes his family deeper into complete

destitution.

“Well, that’s capitalism,” you might say. Perhaps.

We will get to that later. For now, I want to emphasize

that this aspect of Monopoly—the poor get poorer,

while the rich get richer—is not only typical of laissez-

faire economics. It is also characteristic of a certain dy-

namic observed in nature, engineering, and human

relationships, one that mathematicians sometimes de-

scribe as unstable equilibrium.

Take a simple physical metaphor: a marble rest-

ing at the bottom of a salad bowl is going to exhibit a

stableequilibrium—because small movements in any

direction will push the marble up against the walls of

the bowl, and the marble will roll back toward its start

position, also known as its equilibrium point.

If the salad bowl is turned upside down, however,

and the marble is placed at the top of it, the marble

will exhibit an unstableequilibrium: Even if the

marble is balanced perfectly on top of the bowl, and

so remains temporarily motionless, a nudge in any

direction will lead to a feedback loop whereby the

marble rolls off the bowl, moving slowly at first and

then accelerating downward. In general, a stable equi-

librium tends to correct itself, restoring the balance of

offsetting forces that held it in check to begin with;

while an unstable equilibrium tends to destabilize in

one direction or another, until the system in some way

collapses or reaches a different stable equilibrium.

Now let us return to Monopoly. You and your

imaginary opponent are moving your tokens around

the board, seeking to avoid one another’s hotels. In a

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