The Landlord's Game (opens in new tab)

That’s the whole point, it’s a realistic simulation of life

I wonder if they've reinvented the game yet to have similar themes (and that glorious fake money) but to improve on the shortcomings of it, mostly the mid - endgame when it's just a lot of going around the board and waiting for rent to come in / other player's money to drain.

A very interesting twist is to play with real money.

Set a sensible exchange rate to real money and treat the Monopoly money as “chips”.

The tactics and strategy significantly change because there is real external value to the assets and currency - but only for the duration of the game.

Apart from anything else it means the game ends much faster.

I'm not so sure that the whole point of monopoly is to be banker and cheat.

> marketed as a get rich quick scheme

I am seeing bus stop ads here in Sydney with a tagline from a BTC exchange saying something like "If you're seeing bitcoin on a billboard, it's time to buy".

Now I'm hardly an astute investor but I thought the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.

it's almost as if technical solutions can't solve problems with humans/humanity...

Breaking away from financial institutions and getting rich, are not mutually exclusive.

Adam Smith also wanted inheritance mostly abolished except for the small amount necessary to continue supporting a man's wife and young children.

Maybe he hung up a painting and didn’t get his deposit back

And I found this: https://thelandlordgame.com/index.html

Seems to be based on it. Don't know how closely it relates but it is CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licensed and you can just download it.

"The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes such as on income, trade, or purchases that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend."

There's a lot of different forms, and much like Pigoivian taxes that are intended to offset negative externalities, it can be hard to exactly find the right number. But even if one doesn't know the exact number, be it land rent or negative externality, getting closer than the arbitrary $0 can provide improvements.

For real estate, at the optimum land rent, land would exchange hands at a value of roughly $0 (structures on top of the land would modify the total property value). Given the high transaction costs of land, and of changing ownership, there are other forces that shift the true land price away from $0 under a full LVT.

There would need to be exemptions or other ameliorating of the coercive effects of full-land-rent LVT for those living in a primary residence. Nobody wants to force grannies out of their homes, for example. But the coercive effect of land taxation would otherwise mean that land would be used far more productively, with more stable prices and above all more affordable prices. It would also require getting rid of density restrictions that are not based in actual health and safety (ie pretty much all of them). But even somewhat small changes in density can open up massively more land for use.

It doesn't take many homeowners to completely shut off the market for land and corner it all. Not many people watch zoning boards, and fewer pay attention to how limited land use is, and even fewer who are in power do not directly benefit by the massive bubble on land prices.

And we really do have a massive bubble on land prices due to rentierism. So any sane deflation is going to require a gradual phase-in of an LVT, with probably 2+ decades of gentle deflation of land prices. And as soon as that starts in, there are the makings of a tax revolt. In California, we have been suffering from the tax revolt of Prop 13 for 50 years, and we are barely seeing any cracks in the army of anti-tax Prop 13 supporters.

So the politics of a full LVT are extreme, especially in a land where every middle class person is supposed to own a bit of land and defend it like a castle, and often when that defense means stopping any change. A full-on LVT is meant precisely to stop land hoarding, so as long as a majority of people see that land is theirs' to hoard, it's unlikely that an LVT will be passed. Unless imposed from in high by a technocratic elite that's trying to maximize social benefit, rather than individuals looking only to maximize their sole benefit.

Apparently the answer is in the rule book as well (from the WP article):

"The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and a monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game. A win in the anti-monopolist or Single Tax version (later called "Prosperity"), was when the player having the lowest monetary amount has doubled his original stake."

Let's say you have a current property worth $1,000,000. 75% of the value is unimproved land, 25% is the capital improvements (house etc.) It's being rented out at $40,000 a year ($3,333 a month). 75% of the rent is economic rent of the unimproved value of the land, 25% is for the house.

So a 1% land value tax would be $10,000 a year. A 3% LVT would eat up the entirety of the economic rent.

However, the yield on that property would go down from 4% per annum to 1% per annum, so the value of the land would drop.

Any politically realistic implementation would involve progressively increasing the LVT and reducing other taxes over time, so the first year might be 1% LVT, but eventually the price of the property would drop such that a 100% LVT wouldn't be unreasonable (although an 85% LVT or thereabouts is often thought to work better).

Georgism is a pigovian tax on individual land ownership and rent collection. It would reduce or remove taxes arising from labor or capital entrepreneurship, and purely tax the zero-value-add rent collected by the "landed gentry".

Actual percentages and dollar amounts is impossible to give in general, but the basic idea is that returns to pure ownership of land (without improvements) should approach zero. This should eliminate the risk-free speculative ownership of empty lots downtown that are just waiting to cash out on rising land prices due to improvements made by other capitalists and collected taxes.