When I was a college student in Vienna in the late 1960s, my friends and I played a German edition of Monopoly that was of post-World War II vintage. What's more, as the game made its way around the world, its message varied. What had started out as a cautionary tale against the evils of unbridled capitalism became a diversion from the trauma of the Great Depression, and then a parlor game where clever children could end up owning their parents.
From that point on, the game came to teach a rather different economic lesson. This was certainly the case with the version patented by Charles Darrow, "an unemployed steam-radiator repairman and part-time dog walker from Philadelphia" who sold the game to Parker Brothers in the mid-1930s. Monopoly was deeply anti-monopolist.Īs the game evolved, though, subsequent iterations cast aside the communitarian cooperative option. In the game's original version, players could choose to behave like monopolists and drive their adversaries to financial ruin-an outcome whose perniciousness Magie took to be self-evident-or they could agree to cooperate with each other, pay rent into a common pool, and achieve an arguably happier shared prosperity.
As Ketcham explains, the earliest version of Monopoly was designed in 1903 by a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie as a vehicle for popularizing the ideas of Henry George, a now largely forgotten 19th century political economist whose thoughts on remedying inequality in an industrial society were embraced by such contemporaries as Mark Twain, John Dewey, and Leo Tolstoy.
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