Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality
Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality
Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality
By Mary Pilon
January 2015
Summary
In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, a down-on-his-luck family man named Charles Darrow invented a game to entertain his friends and loved ones, using an oilcloth as a playing surface.
He called the game Monopoly, and when he sold it to Parker Brothers he became fantastically rich-an inspiring Horatio Alger tale of homegrown innovation if ever there was one.
In 1904, Magie received a patent for an invention she called the Landlord's Game, a square board with nine rectangular spaces on each side, set between corners labeled "Go to Jail" and "Public Park." Players circled the board buying up railroads, collecting money and paying rent.
The Landlord's Game was sold for a while by a New York-based publisher, but it spread freely in passed-along homemade versions: among intellectuals along the Eastern Seaboard, fraternity brothers at Williams College, Quakers living in Atlantic City, writers and radicals like Upton Sinclair.
The game lost its connection to Magie and her critique of American greed, and instead came to mean pretty much the opposite of what she'd hoped.
It has become a staple of pop culture, appearing in everything from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and "Gossip Girl" to "The Sopranos." You can play it on your iPhone, win prizes by peeling game stickers off your McDonald's French fries, or collect untold "Banana Bucks" in a movie tie-in version commemorating Universal's Despicable Me 2.
In the 1940 census, taken eight years before she died, she listed her occupation as a "Maker of games." In the column for her income she wrote, "0.".
Reference
Pilon, M. (2015, January). Monopoly Was Designed to Teach the 99% About Income Inequality. Retrieved January 05, 2021, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/monopoly-was-designed-teach-99-about-income-inequality-180953630/