THROWING THE DICE - Inventing Monopoly

 

I know of only three ways to win at the game of Monopoly. First you buy or trade to get a monopoly of all four railroads and the three orange properties; St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue and New York Avenue. On average, players land on the oranges more often because they are just after the Jail. Then you build three houses on each, no hotels. This gives you a return on your investment about every ten times your opponents roll the dice.

However the way to give yourself an even better chance of winning is to either become the banker and embezzle your way to victory, or get the other players to adopt a house rule which subtly favors you, and then apply it mercilessly. Real Wall Street bankers play this way all the time. 

Surprisingly few people notice the fundamental capitalistic lesson in Monopoly, which is that you play it with dice. Chance always determines the short term outcome of events, much the same way that bitcoin and other crypto currencies will all eventually collapse because sooner or later everybody rolls snake eyes. 

As proof of this consider what happened to the lady who invented the game of Monopoly. Her name was Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie Phillips, a bright, well educated and determined Illinois Quaker lady, who in her late twenties was looking for a cause. See, Quakers had a long history as abolitionists, and the abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment left them with an identity crises. “Lizzie”  found her new cause in the rantings of a self taught economist with two first names.

All you need to know about Henry George is that in the 1870's he owned a newspaper in San Francisco, and in 1886 he ran for mayor of New York City, coming in second. In short, all his life George was a square peg in search of a round hole. He did not believe in free trade, he didn't like Asians, he liked paper money but he hated taxes - income taxes, sales taxes, and capital gains taxes. He sounds very Republican, doesn't he? Well, he was a Socialist- Catholic- Trade Unionist, who thought government should be supported solely by property taxes. But if you think a government supported only by property taxes is a good idea, I suggest you talk to a member of any school board in America.

“Lizzie” Magie was a Henry devotee, and as the 19^th century drew to a close, she was living in a interracial community of Brentwood, Maryland, and looking for some way to popularize her hero's ideas. Possessing that odd combination of whimsy and discipline required to design games, Lizzie came up with a joyless plaything she called “The Landlord's Game”. “Children of nine or ten,” she assured potential customers, “can easily understand the game and they get a good deal of hearty enjoyment out of it...The little landlords take a general delight in demanding the payment of their rent.”

Lizzie's innovation was that unlike previous Victorian board games, her's had no beginning or end. It was an endless loop. The four corners of her board were labeled Absolute Necessity - Coal Tax, Public Park, Jail and a globe encircled by a banner reading “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages”. Properties along the straightaways were four railroads, a Water Franchise, four Luxury Lanes, and Easy Street, Lonely Lane, Legacy, the Poor House and Lord Blueblood's Estate (No Trespassing, go to jail), and three other Absolute Necessities – Clothing, Shelter, and Bread. Every time you passed the Labor space you got a hundred bucks, and every time somebody landed on a property it went up for auction. In 1902, “Lizzie” took her new game to America's king of games, George S. Parker

When George Swinnerton Parker was sixteen he had invented a card game called Banking. Players borrowed money from the bank and the draw from the 160 card deck determined how successful they would be. George invested $40 to print up 500 decks of Banking cards, and sold 488 of them. 

With that $100 in profit he built an empire, hiring his brother (above right) and issuing similar card games called Klondike Gold Rush and War in Cuba. So,  when Lizzie approached him, George found her a kindred spirit and offered a considered critique of  her game “Landlords”.  

Basically, he told the young Maggie Phillips (above)  that her game stunk. “How do you end this game?” he asked, voicing a concern millions of players would repeat over the next century.  But he also urged her to get her game copyrighted, which Maggie did. She was granted U.S. Patent 748,626 on 5 January 1904.  

In 1906, the brothers hit it big with George's new card game "Rook". Frustrated and almost unnoticed, Lizzie packed her bags and moved to Chicago.

She was supported by other Quakers and followers of Henry George, and in 1906, in Chicago, they formed the Economic Game Company, to publish and distribute the Landlord's Game, with a few modifications. She added a bank, wages, and public transportation in the center of the board. 

Lizzie kept in contact with the Parker Brothers, who, in 1910, bought and published her new card game called "Mock Trial". Game design wasn't a living, but then Lizzie wasn't in it for the money.  She was on a mission. Which is probably why what happened next had little to do with Lizzie.

In 1915 economists Scott Nearing (above) was the most popular lecturer at the Wharton School of Business at Pennsylvania State University. Eventually the trustees would fire him for being a radical, but then eventually the American Communist Party would expel him the same reason. But before he was fired, Nearing introduced The Landlord's game to his students, and they set about spreading it from one fraternity brother to another.

Future "new dealer" Rexford Guy Tugwell (above) introduced a shortened version the game (called Monopoly Auction) to his classmates at Columbia graduate school of Economics. Another Nearing student, Daniel W. Lyman, started marketing his own shortened version of the game (called Finance) in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he labeled the rental properties with local street names and added Chance and Community Chest cards.

In 1929, school teacher Ruth Hoskins (above) learned the game from her brother, who was friends with Daniel Lyman. Later that year she got a job teaching at the Friends (Quaker) School in Atlantic City, and she introduced the game to her students, to teach them about economics.

When she drew up her version of the game board, she named the properties after streets her students lived on in Atlantic City.  

But unfamiliar with the area, she combined the names of two suburbs of Atlantic City - Margate City and Ventor City - into "Marven Gardens".  '

And, since her Quaker students objected to auctions on religious grounds, Ruth (above, center, black dress) the game was changed again, so that landing on a property gave you the sole right to buy it, for the price listed on the deed. After that anyone landing there had to pay rent. Playing the game at Monopoly Parties at her house (above), she sold homemade version. Ruth's improvements added to the growing popularity of the game. .

Ruth's student who lived in Margate City was Charles Todd. He had suggested naming the railroads after real lines. The game's B and O was the Baltimore and Ohio, while the Reading was the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad was for many decades the largest railroad in the world, and while The Short Line was not a specific road, it was the general title for any short commuter rail line. Just as the Great Depression began in earnest in 1932, Charles Todd introduced the game to two new friends who were in a very rough spot.

William Darrow (above) had been a domestic heater salesman in Philadelphia, until the Depression wiped out his livelihood. His was now working at odd jobs, and his wife Esther was pregnant, and one look at the game Monopoly Auction, convinced William that this could be his salvation. 

Charles Todd would later testify that “Darrow asked me if I would write up the rules and regulations, and give them to Darrow.” Whereupon, Darrow asked for two or three copies, which Charles also gave him. And with that, William Darrow was on his way to being a millionaire.

Charles drew up the game board on oil cloth (copying Ruth's misspellings), his wife and son filled in the colors, and a graphic artist then added the icons of Jake the jailbird and Police Officer Edgar Mallory on the Go to Jail cards. 

The little rich guy with the top hat, Uncle Pennybags, would come later, after Charles had copyrighted the game under his own name in 1933 (above) before selling it to Parker Brothers in 1936 as his own invention, which it was not.

The marketing department at Parker Brothers made Monopoly the most popular game in America, and made William Darrow a multimillionaire. He spent the rest of his life traveling the world in luxury. 

Of course, eventually the lawyers at Parker Brothers realized they had a problem with “Lizzie”. Remember her? But this also gave them power over Darrow. So, first they pressured him to give them the free and clear rights to publish the game outside of the United States,  in exchange for taking over all legal costs of defending William against copyright infringement.  All that remained was to get Maggie to sign over her rights to her Landlord's Game.

The new president of Parker Brothers, Robert Barton, later testified that he asked Lizzie if she would agree to some changes in her game. He testified later that her answer was “No. This is to teach the Henry George theory of single taxation, and I will not have my game changed in any way whatsoever." 

So being a good businessman, Barton stopped pushing. Instead he bought Lizzie's rights for a measly $500, and an agreement to publish her new version of The Landlord's Game. 

The third edition of the Landlord's game was shipped to stores all over the United States in 1939. But then Parker Brothers did nothing to promote it. After a few weeks all copies of the Landlord's Game were called back to Parker Brothers and destroyed. By the time Lizzie realized she had been snookered, it was too late. And her game, was quickly forgotten.

In a way, she had just gotten a lesson in the game she had invented. And Parker Brothers had just gotten a great big Get Out of Jail Free card. And that is the real lesson in Monopoly. Capitalism has no morality.

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CLEANING UP ON COAL

 

I know the recipe by heart. Coal, “…a readily combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock”, is simply captured carbon, concentrated out of the air by plants. 

Take a few hundred million tons of plant material and leave it buried under piles of other dead vegetation for 8 or 9 thousand years, and you get peat (above). 

Leave that buried for thirty to sixty million years and you get lignite coal (above). 

Leave it buried for 200 million years and you get Bituminous coal (above). 

Cook and squeeze it for 300 millions years and you get Anthracite (above) or "hard" coal, the cleanest burning coal there is ("My gown stays white / From morn till night / Upon the road of Anthracite") - “cleanest” being a very relative term, of course. But once you have coal, it takes just a couple of centuries more to produce greed and monopolies. It was a preview of the turn of the 20th Century when oil made a few millionaires and kept the rest of the population grasping for clean air and financial security.

Humans adapted the best word they already had to describe the burning stone; char-coal. And since it was first recognized washed up on beaches near Durham along the Scottish boarder (above), they called it sea-coal. It was so rare that it was a prized New Years' gift long before there was a Christmas among the Saxon savages. 

Its fire was so smoky that thieves carried chunks of it with them to conceal their crimes. Other than as a smoke screen, it had little practical use. But as the forests of England were chopped down to build palaces and forts and fleets, and wood became expensive, the peasants turned to heating their miserable huts with sea-coal. And that is when things started to heat up.

Journalist Edwin Black described the early economics of coal in an article at "The Cutting The News.com" (for 18 May, 2009);  “In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 %, while (the price of ) sea coal increased only 23 %… Londoners had no choice but to resort to sea coal, which was rapidly becoming known simply as "coal." 

By 1300, London's total annual demand for wood was 70,000 acres.  By 1400, it was only 44,000 (acres), despite prodigious industrial, commercial and population growth.” The street in London where merchants sold their cargos still bears the name of “Seacoal Lane”. 

And the math was always in favor of coal. One ton of wood contains about 16 million British Thermal Units, while anthracite coal has almost 29 million BTUs.   But the price stabilization  of coal was caused by two rules of economics; the first that a price increase produces an increase in supply - in this case when miners went looking for sea-coal on the and bellow the land . 

The second economic rule which favored coal is that an increase in profits produces an alteration in the tax codes - as merchants share their new wealth with government bureaucrats, who are hired to protect that wealth.

In this case the merchants were a forgotten class of lobbyists called the “Hostmen”. Originally these were the medieval equivalent of modern day Marriot, Hilton and Motel 6 operators. On 24 July, 1567 Queen Elizabeth I granted a patent to a Mr. William Tipper, making him the sole provider of lodging and meals to “merchant strangers” or “merchant adventurers” (what we would call traveling salesmen) visiting London. 

For that privilege Mr. Tipper paid her Majesty 40 shillings for each traveling salesman who paid him, and that is the origin for the term “a big tipper”, as in an extra payment for service. But the Hostmen of Newcastle-on-Tyne (above) had even bigger plans.

Even earlier, in 1529, to make the tax collector’s job easier, the crown decreed that every commodity harvested or produced within the watershed of the small River Tyne and its tributaries (in the vernacular, the Tyneside), had to be trans-shipped through the port city of Newcastle-on-Tyne. That also made it easier for the hostmen of Newcastle to gain control of the coal market, since “…once the coal was on a boat, it was in the hands of merchants and shippers.” (Ibid)

“By the 1550's , the Hostmen (so) commanded the coal--from ground excavation to river distribution (so) that…in 1590, the Lord Mayor of London complained about “…the monopoly and extortion of the owners of Newcastle coals." (ibid) The tip left on the table for Elizabeth was one shilling paid to the crown for every 36 bushels of coal shipped out of Newcastle and the Tyneside. And it was said that just 10 men - and the Queen - controlled the sale of coal throughout all of England and much of coastal Europe.

After the Virgin Queen’s death in 1603, Parliament moved to cancel the royal monopolies. But by then the Hostmen of Newcastle were too rich to be interfered with, i.e. they were too big to fail. Their profit margins remained as high as 65%.  The price of coal was not coming down until somebody or something broke up the Hostman's monopoly.

Not even the bloody English Civil War could break their control of coal. “The Hostmen always produced smart defenses, polished cost justifications and retained the best spokesmen to make their case.” (ibid). By 1661 Thomas Fuller could define the popular phrase ‘to carry coals to Newscastle’ as meaning “…to busy one's self in a needless employment.”  No point in shipping coals to Newscastle, no matter how much you could under cut the Hostmen's prices.  Because you couldn't. It was illegal to even try.

The next step was described in “Extracts from the Company of Hostmen, Newcastle-Upon- Tyne (1901): “…(coal) miners soon drove shafts down to underground water levels, and mines had to be drained before production could be raised…In 1712 Thomas Newcomen's first coal-fired, steam-operated pump was installed in a coal mine in the West Midlands. It pumped 600 liters of water (150 gallons) a minute from the bottom of a shaft 50 m (160 feet) deep…”  But unseen, in this technology, was the death of the Hostman's power.

In less than a hundred years that steam engine, used to drain the coal mines, would be placed on wheels and fed coal from the same mines to produce a loco-motive. And it was that invention, intended to further strengthen the wealth and power of the Hostmen, which finally proved the death of their 400 year old monopoly. 

As Edwin Black observed, “With trains, coal mines far beyond Newcastle were finally able to free themselves from river transport….(and) That was how the Hostmen cartel was finally broken up.”  By new technology.

But the final cost of the Hostmen's and coal company monopolies came due two hundred years later, on Saturday, 6 December 1952.   Still carrying the enormous debt from World War Two, England taxed imported oil  much higher than local mined coal.  

They called it the Great Smog of London. A low pressure zone settled in over the Thames valley and stayed for a week. The exhaust from thousands of steam locomotives, coal fired power plants and internal combustion engines hung on day after day while air quality plummeted.  

The terrible situation was acerbated by thousands of coal fires heating homes and businesses and powering factories,  

Visibility in London fell to one foot, and “smoke ran like water.”  That Sunday the smoky fog was so thick ambulances could not safely navigate city streets, and 6,500 people who were having trouble breathing died when they were forced to walk to London hospitals.   On Monday, with most people locked in their homes and avoiding all physical effort, only 900 died. 

On Tuesday, 9 December,  the wind finally swept the fog away, leaving a final death toll of 12,000 killed in just four days from simply breathing the coal fouled air.

The rock that burns is a killer. And the sooner we stop burning it, the sooner we can breath easier.

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