The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Author:Niall Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: International finance - History, Large type books, International finance, Finance, Money - History, Money, Economics, General, Economics - History, Finance - History, Money & Monetary Policy, International, World, Economic History, Business & Economics, History
ISBN: 9781410415332
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2008-05-14T20:00:00+00:00

5

Safe as Houses

It is the English-speaking world’s favourite economic game: property. No other facet of financial life has such a hold on the popular imagination. No other asset-allocation decision has inspired so many dinner-party conversations. The real estate market is unique. Every adult, no matter how economically illiterate, has a view on its future prospects. Even children are taught how to climb the property ladder, long before they have money of their own.al And the way we teach them is literally to play a property game.

The game we know today as Monopoly was first devised in 1903 by an American woman, Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Phillips, a devotee of the radical economist Henry George. Her Utopian dream was of a world in which the only tax would be a levy on land values. The game’s intended purpose was to expose the iniquity of a social system in which a small minority of landlords profited from the rents they collected from tenants. Originally known as The Landlord’s Game, this proto-Monopoly had a number of familiar features - the continuous rectangular path, the Go to Jail corner - but it appeared too complex and didactic to have mass appeal. Indeed, its early adopters included a couple of eccentric university professors, Scott Nearing at Wharton and Guy Tugwell at Columbia, who modified it for classroom use. It was an unemployed plumbing engineer named Charles Darrow who saw the game’s commercial potential after he was introduced by friends to a version based on the streets of Atlantic City, the New Jersey seaside resort. Darrow redesigned the board so that each property square had a brightly coloured band across it and hand-carved the little houses and hotels that players could ‘build’ on the squares they acquired. Darrow was good with his hands (he could turn out a single game in eight hours), but he also had the salesman’s ‘moxie’, persuading the Philadelphia department store John Wanamaker and the toy retailer F. A. O. Schwartz to buy his game for the 1934 Christmas season. Soon he was selling more than he could make by himself. In 1935 the board-games company Parker Brothers (which had passed on the earlier Landlord’s Game) bought him out.1

The Great Depression might have seemed an unpropitious time to launch what had by now mutated into a game for would-be property owners. But perhaps all that fake multicoloured money was part of Monopoly’s appeal. ‘As the name of the game suggests, ’ announced Parker Brothers in April 1935:

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