Monopoly Vs Capitalism Game

My initial impression was that of my friends when I told them about the game later that day, what an interesting setup. The conventional monopoly represents capitalism in its most basic sense. There are the fundamental components of society, people, money, and property, and the goal of the game is to be the winner (the one who finishes with the most wealth). A notable change to this model, the elasticity of starting funds and returns as the game progressed, produced the game we played. It made the difference between capitalism in its rawest sense, and a capitalism that more closely resembles the actual state of affairs of society, namely, the class struggle.
My initial interest gave way to the discomfort that came with being assigned the position …show more content…
For my partner and I, a card that said to pay all the other players $50 each had little impact on our finances, and that $50 had different values for different individuals from the get-go (usually that will be the case with regular monopoly after a few rounds, after the wealth has been redistributed by chance and skill). Receiving money from these cards also had minor impact on us, but when one of the other players received $100 from community chest, they were ecstatic! For them, they do not even get that amount when they pass go, whereas when we passed go we got five times that amount. This pattern was reflected in the case of the standard tax. Despite the pass-go benefits being different, as well as the starting amount of money, the taxes were not flexible. This meant that the effects of chance and community chest cards were reproduced with taxes. For my team, paying $200 was a fraction of our pass-go profits, much less all our money (it barely compared, it was of no concern whatsoever) but for others it was all of their pass-go profit, and for some, it was more than they would make for passing go twice. The effects are more profoundly negative in correlation to lesser …show more content…
What made our version of the game so unequal was the fact that wealth distribution was unequal, taxes were standard for all, and the effects of community chest and chance cards were not proportional to the wealth and income of individuals/did not consider what they could afford. What would need changing would be the initial starting point, where wealth was distributed equally and the properties were all up for grabs based on chance and skill. If the game were to have to start with different levels of wealth, taxes and cards would need to operate under respect with proportionality. Wealth, it seems, is a great predictor of financial health and stability. For the reasons described by Shapiro, wealth is heavily influenced by SES, and that is out of one’s control. This can be an impediment to social mobility, but the changes suggested here could