Another fascinating aside from Larry White’s The Clash of Economic Ideas (Kindle price just $23.40):
Georgist theory was even the inspiration for the board game Monopoly. The game’s original creator called it “The Landlord Game” and intended it to illustrate the unfairness of receiving rent based on the lucky ownership of advantageous plots.
As chance would it have, I recently taught my sons how to play Monopoly. When I read White’s historical aside, I immediately started wondering, “How would a Georgist Single Tax on unimproved land affect the game?”
The answer: Not as you’d expect. Despite the Georgist origins of Monopoly, rents on unimproved land are miniscule. Check out the price schedule for Boardwalk, the highest-rent square in the entire game:
Without improvements, even Boardwalk only yields a rent of $50. So a full-blown Georgist Single Tax would collect just $50 per landing. If the owner maximally improves the property by erecting a hotel, he’d get to keep $1950 ($2000-$50) a pop – 97.5% of the value. Despite the game’s Georgist origins, almost all of the value comes from improvements.
Is something fishy going on? In Georgist terms, no. Houses and hotels should definitely count as “improvements.” After all, the more you tax houses and hotels, the lower players’ incentive to build them. A non-gamer might imagine that players will always build as many houses and hotels as they can afford. After all, each house only costs $200 – a sum players can usually more than recoup as soon as the next player lands on Boardwalk. If you’re a gamer, though, you’ll quickly realize that things aren’t so simple. Buildings lose 50% of their value if you ever have to sell them, so you have a strong incentive to keep a decent amount of cash in hand.
Does Monopoly reveal a fatal flaw in Georgism? Not at all. (For the real fatal flaw, see my paper with Zac Gochenour). The reason why a Single Tax on the unimproved value of Boardwalk generates so little income is that the game artificially fixes a bizarre package of relative prices. A real estate market where (a) Boardwalk with nothing brings in $50 in revenue, (b) Boardwalk with a hotel brings in $2000 in revenue, and (c) a hotel only costs $1000 to build, simply wouldn’t be stable in a free market. Competing developers would bid up the rent of Boardwalk with nothing, bid down the rent of Boardwalk with a hotel, and/or bid up the price of houses.
The right lesson to draw is simply that despite its creator’s didactic motive, Monopoly is a bad way to grasp the essentials of Georgism. In a truly Georgist game, unimproved rents would be enormous, and improvements would be priced at marginal cost. Would that be a fun game? I doubt it, but perhaps somewhere in cyberspace there’s a game-designing econ geek itching to prove me wrong. If you build it, I will play.
The post appeared first on Econlib.
This is not the ruleset of the Landlords Game. In Lizzie Magie’s version, each property has a base land rent. When a house is constructed, there’s a house rent on top. So far, it’s the same. In Landlords game tho, when all three properties in a set have at least one house, the land rent is doubled. House rent is kept constant. When all three properties have 2 houses, land rent is doubled again. When all three properties have 3 houses, land rent is doubled again. House rent remains constant (per house, up to 3 houses).
Anyway, I’m a Georgist and so I disagree with your conclusion in other ways on Georgism, but I did just want to clear up this bit about Lizzie Magies ruleset.
I wonder if there's a way to get an AI to try playing different versions of the game with different rules, and render a judgement on whether a given set of rules produces a "fun" game.