Our Problem with ‘Monopoly’

Today, the game Monopoly is available in 50 versions on the Hasbro website, including themed iterations featuring Barbie and Marvel characters, versions for kids as young as four years old, and even a “cheater’s edition.” In addition to the many variations on the traditional board game, Monopoly GO! has become a worldwide phenomenon, downloaded more than 150 million times in its first year after launching in April 2023. According to creator company, Scopely, one benefit of the mobile platform is “world-building,” inviting players to “own and grab opportunities. … Roll the dice and make your way to own it all.”

In his acclaimed book, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, John Green examines the complex history of the classic board game. Green writes, “There are many problems with Monopoly, but maybe the reason the game has persisted for so long … is that its problems are our problems.” Its problems are our problems. What exactly does Green mean?

To unravel this mystery, I retraced a fascinating historical thread in the evolution of the game and will consider some implications for how we might do business today.

Without question, the history of this famous pastime is complicated, as is well told by Mary Pilon in her 2015 book, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World’s Favorite Board Game. Contrary to how Hasbro (the company that acquired the game’s original owner, Parker Brothers, in 1991) tells the story, Monopoly was not invented by the unemployed Philadelphia businessman Charles Darrow in the early 1930s at the height of the Great Depression. Rather, the starring character of the story is Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie. A working stenographer in the U.S. Dead Letter Office and aspiring inventor, in 1904 Magie created the Landlord’s Game — Monopoly’s precursor — in order to encourage the feminist movement and propel needed changes in the American economic system.

At the turn of the century, board games were increasingly popular not only as a way to relax but also to communicate important values. Magie was a follower of Henry George, a 19th-century economist, politician, anti-monopolist in an age of industrial titans, and advocate for a single land-based tax system. She patented her game as a way to scale her Georgist ideals. In Magie’s words, the Landlord’s Game, “is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.”

Magie bootstrapped the Landlord’s Game during its early years, and it eventually became popular at universities. With this success, Magie attempted to sell her game to Parker Brothers in 1910 but to no avail. Over the next two decades, homemade versions of her game were produced. One such customization, Finance and Fortune, emerged in Indianapolis in 1932 and was eventually carried to Atlantic City, where the game was adapted to match its new locale. Gaining popularity in Quaker circles, Charles Todd was eventually introduced to it, who later moved to Philadelphia, and introduced it to Charles Darrow. After slightly modifying its design, Darrow successfully licensed the game to Parker Brothers in 1935 — a quarter of a century after Magie had attempted to do so. The rest is history.

The game caught like wildfire with Parker Brothers muscle and intellectual property chicanery, selling 1.75 million copies in 1936 alone, making Darrow one of the first board game millionaires.

It wasn’t until many years later, in the 1970s and 80s, that left-leaning San Francisco State University economist Ralph Anspach, fighting Parker Brothers for his own anti-monopoly board game, unveiled the truth about Monopoly’s history, especially the role that Lizzie Magie had played. By this time, Magie was long deceased, having reaped no substantive benefits or public recognition for her invention. Noting the irony that the Wright Brothers’ “flying machine” and Magie’s Landlord’s Game patent filings fell on the same day, Pilon observes:

The Monopoly case opens the question of who should get credit for an invention, and how. Most people know about the Wright brothers — but don’t recall the other aviators who also sought to fly. The adage that success has many fathers, but we remember only one, rings true — to say nothing of success’s mothers.

Winston Churchill is credited as saying, “History is written by the victors,” and this was certainly the case in the early 1900s when women’s roles in society were seriously marginalized. Magie stood little chance of gaining an advantage over Darrow or the commercial strength of Parker Brothers. At one level, the history of Monopoly is a story of systemic injustice, reminding us that the hard work of truth, fairness, and shared opportunity continues today.

At another level, the history of Monopoly reflects our long-blurred understanding of the true purpose of business. Unbeknown to many, Magie’s original board game had two sets of rules. In the Monopolist version, the goal was to acquire as much real estate as possible, charging rent to bankrupt your opponents. In the other version, called Prosperity, competitors worked as allies to build a healthy economic system.

The popular economic aphorism, “a rising tide lifts all boats” suggests that a flourishing economy cannot be limited to a few but must extend to the many. By creating the Landlord’s Game, Magie sought to show that the anti-monopoly version was the best and most moral path for society. But as Pilon writes, “unbeknownst to Lizzie at the time, it was monopolist rules that would later capture the public’s recognition.”

This history of Monopoly leaves us with an essential question: Why does business exist?

Two prevailing approaches compete for dominance today. The first suggests that business exists to amass wealth for its owners, as commonly espoused by the shareholder wealth model. Accordingly, owners at their discretion can reinvest their profits in society or elsewhere as they see fit. The second approach suggests that business exists to serve — by creating products and services that meet legitimate needs, by creating and sustaining good jobs, and by caring for the environment, local communities, and other vital stakeholders. Hence, profit is a means goal rather than an end goal — a scorecard of sorts demonstrating efficiency and excellence but not the ultimate telos for commercial enterprise.

As Jesus demonstrates through his parables, and then through his actions in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, an orientation toward abundance prevails over scarcity in God’s economy. A scarcity model pulls us toward land grabs and cutthroat competition, but an abundance model toward an ethic of holistic value creation and care.

Green writes, “In the game of Monopoly, power and resources get unjustly distributed until one individual ends up with everything, and only in that sense is it Charles Darrow’s game.” Lizzie Magie had a different accounting of institutional life. Rather than a zero-sum game, she pointed us toward a vision of the good life where Monopoly’s problems don’t have to be ours.