Monopoly-Lite

The board game, Monopoly (Hasbro/Parker Bros.), is good because it teaches some economics--although it does not teach "enough" economics for people to succeed in life. In order to learn enough economics from a simple board game, a revised version of the game is required.

One possible version may be called "Monopoly-Lite"--though there may be much better names than that. In the revised game--the one that teaches you how to achieve real-world success--you could witness effects caused by real-world features.

An example is the "spread" that a bank takes when subtracting the interest it receives from its best customers (the prime loan rate) from the interest it pays out on short-term CDs. In 2012, banks took 17 times what they paid out. Is that sustainable? A simple game might be able to reveal whether it is.

In Monopoly-Lite, not only would "Chance Cards" dictate this and other levels of "banker spread," but the median time that businesses stay open (4-5 years), along with the median net profit (<10%) that they obtain while they are open, would dictate whether net wealth is even created under that kind of an interest-rate spread. Here is an example:

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Chance

Financial regulation, sheltering the big banks from local competition, has now created the situation where saving accounts pay 1% interest, but the prime rate on loans is 17% interest (so that borrowing costs 17 times what it pays to save).

Go back 5 spaces on the board, and pay back any profit earned therein--and you lose your next turn, too--because both savings and loans have now dwindled, eliminating needed investments, and thereby causing recession! Sorry!

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You could also have "Chance Cards" that set the overall debt:income ratio, altering the marginal productivity of new loans. If new loans are not productive (because of prior over-leveraging), then wealth creation stops--because existing capital depreciates and innovation requires new investment: so that all economies require recurring, annual investments (just to stay afloat).

You could have a "Chance Card" that stipulates that less than 40% of national income would be directly tied to the direct provision of services to others (ie, wages reported to IRS not even being as much as 40% of GDP) say, because "technology" put people out of work.

The game would then determine net wealth creation when you separate "payment received" from the "provision of services"--by having over 60% of national income not even tied to the provision of services anymore (so that markets no longer function well).

This could be jokingly-called the "Luddite card," because Luddites thought that technology puts people out of work--even though job creation in the 50 years prior to the Luddite Revolt was lower than job creation after--ie, more jobs under the later condition, when there was even more technology.

This "century of data" effect was confirmed by looking at US job creation from 1946-1963 (lower technology) vs. US job creation after, from 1963-1980 (higher technology). Under the relative economic freedom of those times, more technology was always associated with more job creation (not less job creation).

You could have a "Chance Card" saying that circumstances have led to the government allocating more of the resources of society than all wage-earners combined (highly-centralized resource allocation), such as was the case in the US in 2010.

An algorithm could determine whether you can create net wealth when government is the primary "resource allocator" (ie, central-planned, command economy). People would then learn, from a simple game (aided by a correct economic algorithm), what is economically sustainable and what is not.

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