What playing Monopoly with my 5 year old taught me about reimagining economies

 Someone recently gave us the board game of Junior Monopoly which my five year old was very keen to play.  Having played Monopoly as a child, I was broadly familiar with the rules but needed to refresh by reading the instructions.

The opening line of the instructions read like this: "Have the most money when any other player goes bankrupt (hasn't got the cash to pay rent, buy a property they land on, or pay a Chance card fee)." it continues with stating the object of the game "Zoom around the board, buy every property you land on, collect money and pick up Chance cards. When one player runs out of money, the others count their cash. The player with the most money wins!"

Having spent the last 15 years volunteering in homeless shelters and researching the experiences and related psychological impacts of homelessness and socioeconomic inequality, the objective of driving others to the point of bankruptcy and winning as a result of accumulating the most wealth did not sit comfortably with me.  I wondered about the social and economic principles that millions of us teach our children through hours of 'family bonding time' playing this game.

In a sense, Monopoly plays out like a perfect model of capitalism.  Everyone starts with the same amount of cash and the most skilled player in deciding how to spend that cash ultimately acquires the most assets and wins.  However the dice, like the reality of life, introduces an element of chance that frankly means that we are often not playing on a truly level field; even though everyone starting with equal amounts of cash may suggest otherwise.

I continued to play the game, as my son was very keen to give it a go, and reflected on a story that my mother's partner told us about when she was arrested for protesting the apartheid government.  She was in a cell with several other activists and journalists being held without trial and there was no entertainment other than the board game Monopoly.  The illegally detained prisoners played it for hours but became increasingly aware that the game was training them to be competitive and undermine one another.  They then collectively took the decision to stop playing.  Hearing this story as a teenager, I often thought that it was silly that they'd decided to disengage from their only source of entertainment.  However, playing the game after having spent years looking at the detrimental impact of socioeconomic inequality and the additional systemic challenges faced by those living in poverty, I finally understood exactly what she was talking about.

My husband then came over to see what was happening and was immediately entered into the game and given some cash from the bank.  As all the land had already been purchased, my husband had no possibility of getting very far.   The impact of starting out in life without property made me reflect on intergenerational wealth.  Trevor Noah, in his book 'Born a Crime' talks about his family's personal experiences of the 'black-tax'.  A process through which, two people earning the same money have very different outcomes based on their family's socioeconomic standing.  He talks about how his mother managed to get a reasonably well paid job but as her earnings went into buying appliances (e.g. fridge / cooker) for her grandparents, she had barely enough cash left to get by, never mind advance her own socioeconomic position.  By contrast, people with grandparents who leave them houses in their 20s (often because the parents are financially sorted and don't need the money) are given a huge financial step up.  That cash helps the grandkids put huge deposits down on houses of their own, resulting in smaller mortgages, which results in more disposable income, which means that by age 40, they are able to pay off their own mortgages. Often coinciding with peak earnings, this gives people who inherited assets young even more disposable income which they can invest for their own children/grandchildren and so the cycle of intergenerational wealth continues, and the attainment gap broadens.

Back in the game of Monopoly with our son, something surprising and slightly wonderful happened.  I tired of playing the game after 30 minutes and may have given the bank more money than it was owed.  Soon finding myself bankrupt, I explained to my son that I was now bankrupt and that he had won the game.  His response was not the jubilation that often results from him winning.  He said 'Oh no, mommy, you can't stop playing' and proceeded to hand over half of his cash.  We continued playing and my son switched out whoever’s property my husband landed on with a token to make it his.  As a first time player and person of five, it makes sense that he would see us get every piece of land we landed on and thereby intuitively did the same for my husband without thinking of rents and purchase prices.

The unsolicited act of generosity helped me realise that the game could be used to teach kids (and adults) about different economic models and economic inequalities, as well as help us test out different financial models.  I'm looking forward to the boys being older and popping different economic models and positions in those models into a hat.  We can then set up the board accordingly and see how the game plays out given our different randomly chosen positions.  We can look at different models of lending; such as microfinancing or crowdfunding and see how that plays out over the course of the game.  What I'm most looking forward to is seeing what rules and changes the kids initiate, like my son did in the first game we ever played.  I'm so grateful to him for showing me that if we choose to play by the rules, we can certainly trap ourselves into win-lose positions but if we look at things with a fresh perspective, the outcomes will most certainly change. :-)