Cavalcade: Taking Cues from a Board Game

Over Thanksgiving week, my two roommates and I did what most 25 year old guys of distinction do in the early evening: play ‘Monopoly’ on our Sega Genesis.

Yes – Sega Genesis (we collectively agree console games stopped being fun when they went to the interwebs, but that’s another story). Anyway, most of the negative stigma with ‘Monopoly’ is the length in which the game can go (hours, days, etc.) and the dirtiness of tactics of players (i.e. monopoly-related violence). However, what I noticed what the increasingly similarity to our economy’s composition to the Parker Brothers game.

So as many of you know, the goal of ‘Monopoly’ is to effectively gain a set of property (the ‘monopoly’), in which you could buy houses or hotels on each space, increasing the rent of each of these space. Some properties – your Baltic and Mediterranean avenues – are the equivalent of your slums whereas Park Place and Boardwalk resemble high-end coastal properties, each with respective rent rates (Baltic with a hotel is $250 of rent compared Boardwalk hotel’s $2,000 – of course, these all are 1935-based prices).

In the game, a player could land in jail (or collect a “Get Out of Jail Free” card), pay income taxes and utilities, and collect income through passing “Go.” Additionally, players can make deals with each other, such as forgoing rent and making alliances. All things that have a real-life equivalent.

With Occupy Wall Street and an increased awareness of income inequality, the game of ‘Monopoly’ is no longer played with dice on a board, a thimble, and a race car, but now with the increased value and consolidated power of financial corporations, utility companies, and political organizations, it’s the American public that’s being taken on a dice roll of a nation of broad-based wealth to a small number of individuals who would wield influence that could not be swayed.

Ten years ago, the names of Fleet, Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers were among the dozens of national financial companies that led Wall Street. Those names – through mergers, collapses, and assumptions – in addition to many others are now consolidated into four behemoths: JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. The same goes for telecom, which is now held by AT&T (Ma Bell returned, folks), T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint; and media with Time Warner, News Corporation, and Disney.

Pretty much, these companies hit a series of good streak of ‘doubles’ without going to jail (i.e. previously passed regulatory legislation that’s been largely dismantled). And by creating a ‘perfect storm’ of a loophole-ridden tax code, flexing strength through lobbying for less regulation, and creating unannounced alliances, the ‘rent’ that the American public will continue to rise as long as these companies can build their ‘hotels’ and ‘houses’ on the backs of the American taxpayer.

And when you think the American public caught a break – guess what? Go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Jail in this sense is the inability for one to rise to the upper class, let alone the inability to get a job or achieve the American dream.

So as we were wrapping up one of more recent games, my one roommate – who had gone to jail numerous times (in the game), attempted to make ill-conceived deals – was finally able to build a hotel and had a gleam in his eye. I, who had controlled three monopolies on the board, didn’t think it was wise to build. No later than one turn after that, his hotel, along with all of his cash, were mine as he landed my hotel-filled Illinois Avenue. I didn’t need his money or his properties, but it shows how fast one can believe that they can make it before the “powers that be” come back to collect that ‘rent.’

Print PDF