this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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That lesson was always the point of monopoly of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
Exactly. It was also designed to show that rent is the way you transfer money from the poorer people to the richer people and this progressively transfers wealth not because of merit but because of rent.
Of may surprise you to know that economists call attempts to use capital to create unearned income "rent seeking behaviour" and it's seen as harmful to well functioning markets.
You're more likely to know that economists see dominance of a market by one company (monopoly eg Google for advertising, Amazon for e-commerce) or by two (duopoly) as harmful and there used to be a lot of work done in regulating markets to make due companies played fairly with each other and with the public, but Reagan, Thatcher and the other neoliberals correctly said that the regulations held businesses back from making large profits enabling a lot of shareholders to become very rich indeed very quickly whilst the rest of us became steadily poorer. Very much like the board game showed us inevitably happens.
Ironically, The Landlords game was stolen by a larger company, so rebranded it with more character and got rid of the version without the unfairness; it was considerably less exciting because it made it hard for players to exploit a random small advantage to first steadily then rapidly extract all the money from the other players. I wish we were in that version of reality.
On the other hand, my news feed keeps offering articles from "people" telling me how much better it is to rent and it's a sucker"s game to own. Usually it's based on an overstated claim of convenience, but most recently one tried to use all sorts of hand waving to assert that it is also financially better. Extra rich that the author even admits he owns a lot of property that he rents out while simultaneously trying to make it sound stupid to actually own your own house (claimed he himself rented so that he's not "stuck" paying his own loan). I'm sure these are very sincere and smart people, why would they steer anymore wrong?
Don't know if it's real or my imagination, but it seems there are times when there's extra pressure to convince people that they want to eternally rent.
I think the only case where renting might make sense is if your rent is stupid low, and you can invest the money you'd be spending in something making stupid gains. But that's very unlikely to happen.
It makes sense if your job isn't very stable. For example, if you're brought into be a consultant on a project that will last a guaranteed 18 months, but probably not much beyond that, it probably doesn't make sense to buy a house. If you're a construction worker working on a major project, like a bridge being built somewhere, or the construction of a data center, but when that project is done there isn't likely to be any major local demand for your trade.
Even if you're hoping that something is going to be a long-term move, sometimes it's smart to start off renting until you can establish yourself. Like, if you're the best actor Wyoming has ever produced, so you're going to move to Hollywood to break into the industry, it might be smart to start out by renting rather than buying a house in LA.
The advantage with rentals is that your maximum commitment is normally a year, and often it's less than that. When you buy a house, you owe upwards of 5% to the agent. On a $500k house, that's $25k that just goes up in smoke as soon as the transaction closes. If you have to sell the house, move, and buy a new house 1 year later, you're spending $25k per year on agents fees. It would be difficult to come up with a rental arrangement that's financially worse than that.
Not that long ago you could just rent month by month, with first and last months rent as a deposit (Which they kept if you didn't give 30 days notice).
Im showing my age but having to enter a fucking contract for an APARTMENT is insane to me.