Compute and Poverty

Don’t Blame the Players: Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game

7 min read

In 2024 I wrote: “Life is like a rigged Monopoly game. Most will spend their lives continuously circling the board, paying rent and taxes until they either go broke or end up in jail, as land monopolists amass more wealth and power.”1 I suspect anyone who has played to the end knows the feeling. Late in the game, nobody at the table is a villain. Everyone follows the same rules, and the rules decide who ends up with the board. As they say on The Wire, the game is the game. I don’t blame the players. I blame the game.

What surprises people is that Monopoly was designed to make exactly that point. It began as The Landlord’s Game, invented by a follower of Henry George to show what land monopoly does, and it came with a second way to play.

A game built to make a point

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie was a stenographer near Washington, D.C., and a single taxer, as George’s followers were called. Her father had given her a copy of Progress and Poverty.2 In the autumn of 1902 she described her game in The Single Tax Review: “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” Her “original intention,” she wrote, was “simply to work out a demonstration of how the landlord gets his money and keeps it.”3

She had children in mind. Young players “learn that the quickest way to accumulate wealth and gain power is to get all the land they can in the best localities and hold on to it.” She trusted their sense of fairness: “Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the evil will soon be remedied.”3

Her patent, U.S. 748,626, was granted on January 5, 1904. The board already looks familiar: a continuous track of lots, railroads, water and light franchises, a jail, and a corner where “each time a player goes around the board he is supposed to have performed so much labor upon mother earth, for which after passing the beginning-point he receives his wages, one hundred dollars.”4 Passing Go began as payday, set against rent from the start. In a revised patent of 1924 she stated the purpose outright: “to illustrate to them how under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprises and also how the single tax would discourage land speculation.”5

Two ways to play

Magie built the lesson as a comparison. Mary Pilon, whose 2015 book The Monopolists tells this history in full, writes that she created “an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.”2

The 1932 edition, The Landlord’s Game and Prosperity, shows how the second set worked. Players “abolish all taxes and instead pay the specified Land Rents into the Prosperity Land Rent Fund of the Public Treasury.” A landlord “retains only the rent for Improvements,” meaning the buildings he paid for. Utilities and railroads pass into public hands as the fund grows. The jail goes unused, because “there is no reason for trespassing.” And the goal changes: when the player with the least money has doubled his original capital, “Prosperity is achieved.”6

That is George’s remedy, to “appropriate rent by taxation” (Book VIII), rendered in cardboard.7 The rules sheet put the idea in two lines: “The players solve the problems by following their own self-interest,” and “The Landlord’s Game shows why our national housekeeping has gone wrong and Prosperity Game shows how to start it right and keep it going right.”6 Same players, same dice, same self-interest. Only the rules change, and so does the ending.

How the game escaped

The Landlord’s Game never sold widely, but it spread by hand. The economist Scott Nearing learned it around 1910 in Arden, Delaware, a village founded on George’s ideas, and later said he taught it to his Wharton students so they might learn “the wickedness of land monopoly.” Rexford Tugwell, later an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, remembered playing it in 1915.8 A federal appeals court later found it was played in the early 1920s at Princeton, MIT, Smith, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford, and that it reached Atlantic City around 1931, where players switched to local street names.9 Quakers there, including Jesse and Eugene Raiford, fixed the property prices.8 Along the way the prosperity rules fell away. Players decided, in Christopher Ketcham’s phrase, that redistribution “was not nearly as entertaining as ruining one another.”8

Darrow, Parker Brothers, and $500

Charles Darrow, an unemployed Philadelphia salesman, learned the Atlantic City version from friends in late 1932 or early 1933 and sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935, “claiming that it was his own invention.” The company president who negotiated the deal later testified that he did not believe him.9 Darrow collected royalties for life. Parker Brothers also bought Magie’s 1924 patent and two other game ideas, for which, Pilon writes, she reportedly received $500 and no royalties. In 1936 the Washington Evening Star concluded that the game “has cost her more than she made from it.”10 She died in 1948, and neither her headstone nor her obituary mentions it.2

The lawsuit that dug it up

The story came out because of another game. In the early 1970s the economics professor Ralph Anspach made Anti-Monopoly. His game, he wrote, “would have to start” “where Monopoly ends, when the board is full of monopolies.”8 The owners of Monopoly fought him over the trademark for a decade. Researching his defense, he found Magie’s patents and the trail of homemade boards. In 1982 the Ninth Circuit ruled that “Monopoly” had become a generic name for a board game, and called the lower court’s description of Darrow as inventor “clearly erroneous.”9

Credit has come slowly. In 2015 Hasbro, which now owns the game, said it “credits the official Monopoly game produced and played today to Charles Darrow.”10 Its 2019 Ms. Monopoly edition called Magie “one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games.”11 A 2025 Royal Mint release for a coin made with Hasbro, marking the game’s 90th year, says it “evolved from ‘The Landlord’s Game’” by Lizzie Magie, “inspired by the economic theories of Henry George.”12

What the board still shows

George opened Progress and Poverty with a puzzle: “This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.”13 His answer was rent. “The increase of rent which goes on in progressive countries is at once seen to be the key which explains why wages and interest fail to increase with increase of productive power” (Book III).14

Monopoly acts this out. The wage for passing Go never rises, but rents climb as owners build, so each lap the same pay covers less of the board. Eventually every square is owned, and as I wrote last year, “if you’re lucky, you might end up in jail for a few rounds to momentarily stop the bleeding.”15 Nobody has to cheat for this to happen. The ending follows from who owns the land and who must pay to stand on it. George put it in one line: “The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land.”16

It’s only a game

To be fair, Monopoly is a game, not proof. Its economy is closed, its towns never grow, and it is built to end with one winner. Real rent depends on what a whole community builds around a site, and a board cannot settle an argument about tax policy. I don’t claim it does.

What it can do is what Magie wanted: let people feel how rules shape outcomes. As I wrote in 2023, “it was created by a Georgist to teach that one of the major factors driving poverty and inequality is land monopoly.”17 She gave us two rulebooks, and we kept one. The players were never the problem. The question is which game we choose to play.

Read further

Notes

  1. GANDALFO on X, July 6, 2024, https://x.com/gandalfo/status/1809817009380614603 ↩︎

  2. Mary Pilon, “Monopoly’s Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn’t Pass ‘Go’,” The New York Times, February 13, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190321123832/https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/business/behind-monopoly-an-inventor-who-didnt-pass-go.html). Adapted from Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015). ↩︎a↩︎b↩︎c

  3. Lizzie J. Magie, “The Landlord’s Game,” The Single Tax Review, Autumn 1902, https://landlordsgame.info/articles/LLG_SingleTaxReview-1902.html. Also reprinted at https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/phillips-elizabeth-magie_landlord's-game-1902.htm ↩︎a↩︎b

  4. L. J. Magie, Game-Board, U.S. Patent 748,626, filed March 23, 1903, granted January 5, 1904, https://patents.google.com/patent/US748626A/en ↩︎

  5. Elizabeth Magie Phillips, Game Board, U.S. Patent 1,509,312, filed April 28, 1923, granted September 23, 1924, https://patents.google.com/patent/US1509312A/en ↩︎

  6. The Landlord’s Game and Prosperity, rules, Adgame Company, 1932 (under Patent 1,509,312), https://landlordsgame.info/games/lgp-1932/lgp-1932_rules.pdf ↩︎a↩︎b

  7. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879), Book VIII, Chapter II ↩︎

  8. Christopher Ketcham, “Monopoly Is Theft,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2012, https://harpers.org/2012/10/monopoly-is-theft/ ↩︎a↩︎b↩︎c↩︎d

  9. Anti-Monopoly, Inc. v. General Mills Fun Group, Inc., 684 F.2d 1316 (9th Cir. 1982), https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/684/684.F2d.1316.81-4281.html ↩︎a↩︎b↩︎c

  10. Mary Pilon, “The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins,” The Guardian, April 11, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/secret-history-monopoly-capitalist-game-leftwing-origins ↩︎a↩︎b

  11. “‘Ms. Monopoly’ celebrates female trailblazers, except the one who created Monopoly,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 11, 2019, https://www.inquirer.com/news/ms-monopoly-hasbro-elizabeth-magie-charles-darrow-new-game-20190911.html ↩︎

  12. The Royal Mint, “Pass Go, Collect Your 50p,” September 15, 2025, https://www.royalmint.com/aboutus/press-centre/pass-go-collect-your-50p-the-royal-mint-unveils-uk-50p-celebrating-90-years-of-monopoly/ ↩︎

  13. George, Progress and Poverty, Introductory ↩︎

  14. George, Progress and Poverty, Book III, Chapter II ↩︎

  15. GANDALFO on X, November 11, 2025, https://x.com/gandalfo/status/1988323295931101478 ↩︎

  16. George, Progress and Poverty, Book V, Chapter II ↩︎

  17. GANDALFO on X, July 27, 2023, https://x.com/gandalfo/status/1684626746111647744 ↩︎