the game’s naturally unstable rich-get-richer dynamic.
Of course, what I am describing here is not just a
way to fix Monopoly. It is a way to fix one of the basic
problems with capitalism as we now experience it in
the era of globalized winner-take-all commerce. A
hundred years ago, a successful store owner could put
other store owners in his neighborhood out of busi-
ness. In 2020, Amazon and Alibaba are pushing whole
bricks-and-mortar retail sectorsinto bankruptcy on a
global level. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook are vac-
uuming up the lion’s share of web advertising. As The
New Republicreportedin late 2018, monopolies now
penetrate almost every economic sector: “Two compa-
nies make 64 percent of American diapers; one com-
pany builds 52 percent of America’s mobile homes;
two companies produce 78 percent of its corn seeds;
and one company assembles 61 percent of syringes.”
As many economists have noted, the resultant in-
come inequality is not just a threat to egalitarian ideals.
It is a threat to capitalism itself, since the health of the
free market always will depend on a viable middle class
that supplies both demand and labor to a mass-retail
economy. (Poor people do not have enough money to
buy much. And the super-rich spend a very small per-
centage of their income on goods and services.)
A game of Monopolyends when one player has all
the money and everyone else is bankrupt. But a
human society is not something that you fold up and
put back in the box. It is not supposed to end. So you
need a way to stabilize the economic dynamic, to
make sure the rider doesn’t fall off the Segway, to keep
the marble on top of the upside down salad bowl. Oth-
erwise, you get depressions, financial crises and even
revolutions.
Critics of capitalism often decry the “greed” that
animates successful entrepreneurs. The real problem,
however, is not the amount of money made by people
at the top; it is the systematic suppression of people at
the bottom. The real-life equivalent of the Monopoly
player who has to mortgage all his money-making as-
sets to pay his debts is the hand-to-mouth day laborer
who, unable to pay his car insurance, loses his car and,
unable to drive to his job, is unable to pay his rent.
The villain here is not necessarily the avarice of the
banker who loaned this poor fellow his money in the
first place. It is the unstable dynamic of a system that
mercilessly drives some people down to the bottom
through a succession of cascading misfortunes.
To experience the board game version of this
kind of misery vortex in Monopolyis to appreciate the
advantages of the welfare state, which, when it is func-
tioning properly, doesn’t just redistribute money from
rich people to poor people. It also softens the iterativefeedback dynamics within the system so as to ensure
that minor nudges—a lost job, a criminal conviction, a
divorce, a medical setback—do not create feedback ef-
fects that ultimately produce a full-blown personal ca-
tastrophe. Job training, public health care, a humane
criminal justice system, community housing, and sup-
port for single mothers are examples of programs that
can achieve that effect.* * *It has been almost thirty years since I devoted my-
self to the academic examination of stability theory
and dynamical systems. Regardless, it is the sort of
subject that, once studied, can never be forgotten.
And this kind of analysis continues to color every
aspect of my outlook on life—including the way I
think of the future of our species.
Consider climate change, perhaps the most im-
portant issue facing the planet. One of the reasons
why climate modeling is so complicated is that our
climate is, on at least one level of analysis, an unstable
dynamical system that, if pushed hard in one direction
(say, by massive surges in atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentrations) can cause a cascade of feedback ef-
fects that compound the initial perturbation, and send
the whole atmosphere into a radically different equi-
librium state.
Understanding the nature of these “feedback ef-
fects” is critical if we are to understand the threat. To
take one example, a warming earth causes glaciers to
melt, thereby decreasing the amount of surface snow
and ice that reflect solar radiation back into the atmos-
phere. Thanks to this sort of positive feedback mecha-
nism, a warmer earth keeps getting warmer, melting
more ice, absorbing more solar radiation and so on,
until Miami Beach is chest-deep in water.
Or consider war, that ancient scourge of human
civilization. “Firepower and heavy defensive arma-
ment—not merely the ability but also the desire to
deliver fatal blows and then steadfastly to endure,
without retreat, any counter-response—have always
been the trademark of Western armies,” wrote Victor
Davis Hanson in his 1989 classic, The Western Way of
War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. The reason why
these ancient battles typically were so decisive—“a
single, magnificent collision of infantry,” as Hanson
described the archetype—is that the brand of warfare
waged by Greek phalanxes (and, later, Roman mani-
ples) often exhibited the same fundamentally unstable
equilibrium you see in chess, even when the adver-
saries were, at the dawn of battle, evenly matched.
When soldiers lost their nerve because an aspect2 4 S K E P T I C M A G A Z I N E volume 25 number 1 2020