Games That Teach How To Use Money Or Be Weatlhly

You should try this game.

I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game "Monopoly" which shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are "fair," the game of Oligarchy shows that the "free market" leads inexorably to one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.

The reason this is important is that it disproves one basic tenet of the free-market idea– that it is a game with many winners. Rather the free market, without redistribution, puts everyone (except one) in debt bondage, and quickly. We joked that those that were run out of money had to sell organs. Our game broke up into social classes– it was not worth it to the rich to play with the poor. It was all very real for a simple game.

All of this is based on a paper in Scientific American, Is Inequality Inevitable? Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests, which has been a mind-blower for me: it is so simple and disproves the Libertarian premise.

We played 4 rounds with 6 people in about an hour:

each gets a pad of paper and pen and writes $100 at the top, that is their pot of money
each gets a coin to flip

Then each player picks another player agrees to gamble on a flip of a coin, they agree on which wins on heads, and tosses. The stake of the gamble is set at 50% of the lesser of the pots of that pair. So in the beginning, when everyone has $100, the gamble is $50.

Then the players pick another player (or the same player) to do another round. This proceeds.

What is amazing is that even through each toss is "fair" in that it is a 50-50 chance to win a straight amount of money, the results shows one player wins all the money, and really quickly.

Two nephews and their partners, Mary and I played 4 rounds in about an hour and we discovered social classes (we called the broke ones "organ sellers"), feeling of righteous empowerment based on being successful (even though it was completely random), but also that "free market" ended with all-but-one-of-us in a bad situation really quickly.

Try it, it is fun. And read the article, it is startling– free-market without redistribution goes to Oligarchy very very fast. This book on Sumerian and Babylonian economics shows it has always been this way, so people developed peaceful reset mechanisms with debt forgiveness and Julilee: …and Forgive Them Their Debts by Michael Hudson.

[And now you can see it played automatically! http://hackerfactor.com/oligarchy-game.php Go Neal!]

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