Monopoly games teach about The Deficit

The board game monopoly was originally designed to educate people about the dynamics of rentier capitalism with a view to advocating measures like a land value tax to control the worst excesses. The designer, Elizabeth Magie:

... hoped the famous game company would turn her “beautiful brainchild” into a popular way of disparaging greedy monopolists. The company had other ideas. Elizabeth Magie and the true origins of the board... - Austin Kleon

I have a dislike of Monopoly as I've blogged before. But recently it's occured to me that it could be a way to help people to think about the deficit and government spending which is more accurate and therefore helpful than the current austerity discourse which picks up Maggie Thatcher's misanalogy* to a household budget.
In the household spending misanalogy, the Micawber lesson ("Income 19 shillings, spending 20 shillings. Result, misery") seems obvious when applied to the 'tax and spend' idea of government deployment of money. There is an aspect of the game that is far more helpful in giving us a productive analogy for a body like a national government which is in charge of issuing money (and leaving aside, for the moment, the matter of the role of private banks in money supply). In many games in the latter phases, a cash crisis can often develop: the banker runs out of notes to enable transactions to take place. The rules allow the banker, at that point, to create their own notes. Informally, some players in some games come up with other solutions: iou's or ledgers are the most obvious and probably frequent.

It's the role of the game's banker in that situation of cash-undersupply that I want to focus on. Basically, in such a situation, we have money being created and injected into the game. The game-banker has not gained that money through tax. It is simply that the economy of the game at that point needs more cash for the economy, that is the game, to continue. We can see clearly here that the role of the game's banker is simply to make sure that there is enough money for the transactions that make up the game's economy to continue. That money does not need to be earned or pulled out of the game by tax. No, rather the point of the money is that it represents the economic activity going on round the board and facilitates exchange and further development of the game.

So now the analogy to government spending can begin to be made. Firstly by noting that the government is more like the Monopoly-game's banker than Dickens' Mr Micawber: the government issues money for the whole economy to use for settling payments and debts (or at least it can do, caveat as above). To picture the government as one of the players in the game who can only pick up £200 when they pass go and has only that and rents to play with is a fundamental mistake**. As the issuer of money, the banker's /government's role is simply and basically to make sure that there is sufficient money in the economy /system /game to keep exchanges flowing and the game going.
That's the main thing to get hold of. When you have taken that in and can basically see how the banker is not like an ordinary player and how a household budget is not like providing a medium of exchange, we can complicate a bit.

Making the analogy more model-like

If we take it that an analogy is a simple comparison and a model is like a bunch of analogies all tied together in a single theme or comparative object, then we can move the analogy we've just noted towards being a simple model by noting some other analogues. A model is a kind of allegory for the purpose of making sense of something.

So what other analogies does Monopoly offer to understand The Deficit***? Well, let's think about some situations that could arise in the game and match them up with an actual economy.

There are times in the game when, as mentioned already, the game's banker needs to issue more money to facilitate the continued exchanges (that is to keep the economy going). If the game's banker were to refuse to do so and insist that only money already present in the game could be used then there would be two or three (related) things that could happen.

One thing would be that there would be stagnation. Having no money to settle debts or to spend on land, houses or hotels, players would have to stop buying and selling in part or totally.

Another thing might be that there could be inflation of the value of money. This would, in the case of the game have to be by explicit mutual consent of the players (corresponding to the evolving mutually defined valuation that takes place through markets and experience of buying and selling that takes place in the real economy). The point is that the players could agree to revaluing the currency: say, £1 now means £10 and so on^. This is something that can and arguably does take place in the real economy in some circumstances^^.

And still another thing might be that a further development of the banking system could take place to get round the lack of liquidity, the gamers could issue each other IOUs but this would be increasingly inconvenient as the economy of the game continued to grow. IOUs could be improved by keeping ledgers and clearing funds every so often. This would be inventing a mini peer-to-peer banking system. Another trick would be for the game's banker to take in the 'savings' of the players and to write IOUs for the money that players have stashed away. This would, in effect, be a commercial banking system^^^.

That latter tactic would be a little model of the basics of the banking system where deposits formed the basis for loans. But we shan't go into that here because we need to get back to the main topic.

The point that I'm now moving us towards in this post is that a government with powers of sovereign money issuance is not restricted to the Austerity method of Micawber-Thatcher bookkeeping. The fact that at a national economy level the issue of money is 'backed' by the whole economy makes a difference. It means that restricting the supply of money (and this has several dimensions to it) throttles back the ability for exchange to take place. The converse is also the case: increasing the supply of money (and again, this can take place through various mechanisms) can, in appropriate circumstances and handled rightly, call forth more exchange and in turn this can encourage further production of goods and services.

To illustrate that latter point, in the game of Monopoly, increasing the supply of money would enable players to buy more land, houses and hotels more quickly (to a limit). A lack of money slows and stops the game unless more money is created and somehow fed back into the game's economic system. The game's banker does not need first to 'earn' that money, say through tax or fines from the players, they just need to supply money to support the current and immediately potential exchange activity. In these circumstances, to do the Austerity thing, ie restrict the money supply, would slow and crash the game.

This indicates that in a crash / crunch situation, what is needed is to make sure that money is put into the economy to call forth or maintain exchange potential. This is basically what John Maynard Keynes saw in the early 20th century and which has covertly been recognised with the use of Quantative Easing (however badly directed that has been).

Of course, more needs to be said about the ways that money supply can be increased or decreased (the devil and the solutions are in the detail) and the effects for good or ill that this can have. But the take-home point is that Austerity is a crock: it's founded on a faulty analogy and one that in the doing of it makes the poor poorer and the rich richer.
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* I well recall in the late 1970's, when the election campaign was raging that saw Mrs Thatcher become Britain's Prime Minister, realising that my A level Economics showed me how misleading it was to pretend that government spending was like a household budget. Once you've started to look at money supply issues, Keynsianism and the like, it doesn't seem such a straightforward or helpful analogy at all. For those educated outside Britain, A levels ('Advanced levels') were and are exams whose grades are used by universities to determine who to offer places to. It's worth noting that A level Economics is not widely taught and so most university Economics courses end up having to use the first year (perhaps more) to cover what an A level takes in.
** The mistake is one, without doubt, that neoliberal bankers and their political and industrial mates are happy for us to continue to make (and many of them probably believe it themselves. To be sure, it suits the ideology of shrinking state and putting finance in control, in effect.
*** The Deficit, in capitals like that, is my way of referring to the totem of what I'm calling 'Austerity Discourse'. Austerity discourse is a political fable used to justify reducing government spending and 'shrinking government'. The central totem is the analogy (or framing) of the household budget: income and outgoings. This construct enables austerity-promoters to disable the exercise of sovereign money by government which keeps the economic discourse within parameters that favour their projects. The Deficit is then a phrase that can be deployed to rein in any proposals that would use the powers of sovereign money in ways that don't fit the austerity narrative.
^ And this, of course, reminds us in passing that the value of money vis-a-vis goods and services in the real world is something that we construct socially. Money is a cultural artefact not a force of nature.
^^This is not to concede to monetarist theory, simply to recognise that in certain circumstances there is a reality, particularly in a circumstance like the game where a dynamic factor like velocity of circulation can't make up for shartfalls in quantity.
^^^ This is essentially a historical sort of model of the origins of commercial banking. There have been developments since: from lending out deposits, to fractional reserve banking through to money-creation-lending that we see today and which Positive Money (and others) critiques as, in effect, the privatising for profit of what should be a public good -a money supply that ensures a well functioning economy for the many not just the few.

PS (Posted 3Dec2016) I thought it affirming to find someone else using monopoly as a way to help us to understand some macroeconomics. So ...
In the game Monopoly, $200 is the amount every player gets for passing Go. Such cash infusions aren’t bad for the game; instead they help all players play the game. The same would happen in our real economy if everyone gets infusions of $200 a month. The extra money would relieve some burdens of working families and heighten their chances for success and satisfac­tion. And it would stimulate our economy without higher debt.

Sensory metaphors activate brain parts for relevant sensory experience

This looks like the neurological confirmation Lakoff and Johnson hoped for in Philosophy in th Flesh.

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language

Bodily experience is deeply at the heart of our ability to think. Wholistic -dare I say incarnational- approaches are affirmed. What it suggest furhter to me is that the value in enacted/embodied prayer and ritual actions are likely to be quite deeply felt if they are well targetted.

Hearing metaphors activates brain regions involved in sensory experience:

Right or left values: more literal than you think

The evidence seems to be piling in nowadays, here's some more: Are your values right or left? The answer is more literal than you think: "'We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,' says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, 'One of those metaphors is space.'"
This is related to what I quote often from Philosophy in the Flesh which for its faults, nevertheless seems to be proving right in its prediction that further brain research would uncover the fundamentally metaphoric basis of much of our 'higher order' thinking. The basic idea is that the neurological schemas (for want of a better term, I'm not a neuro-psychologist) we use for handling space (among other things) in terms of processing informations and decisions about our placement and movement in space are co-opted by the brain to think about other things. Hence 'Up is good'. This bit of research seems to indicate another spatial metaphor such that (I think) 'right hand man' seems to have more than co-incidental basis: it's a motivated sign. But don't go determinist with this:

"People generally believe that their judgments are rational and their concepts are stable," says Casasanto. "But if a few minutes of gentle training can flip our judgments about what's good or bad, then perhaps the mind is more malleable than people think."

Sign languages make working of metaphor clearer

I'm not sure that this is as big a break-through as it seems to be written up here, though it is certainly interesting to me as a linguist. But the phenomenon described is familiar to most of us who have worked on translations or been tripped up by a literal interpreting of a metaphor only to realise that a certain sense/shade of meaning doesn't map between the most natural choices in source and target languages. Check out the summary article here: Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors.
"This study shows that the iconicity of a form may constrain the possible metaphorical extensions that the form might take. Put another way, certain metaphorical expressions in spoken language cannot be 'translated directly' into sign language if their form is iconic."
And if that seems a bit opaque to you then perhaps the 'for instance' will clarify. I think it's interesting. The newer thing is the way that the performance of a ASL or (in this case) ISL sign constrains the connotative meaning and so what is available in terms of extended meanings available to remap in metaphoric usage.
"it is impossible to use the sign FLY (in Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language) in the expression "time flies" or "the day just flew by." The metaphorical uses of a word such as FLY are impossible because of the form of this sign, in particular, its iconicity. The sign for FLY is produced by moving the arms as if flapping one's wings. But in the expression "time flies," we do not mean that time is flapping its wings. Rather, the metaphor is built on an implication of the action of flying, namely that it is a very fast way of motion. So there is a clash between what the form of the sign encodes (wing flapping) and the aspect of meaning on which the metaphor is built (fast movement)."
However, we should also recall the probable truth of the thesis in 'Metaphors we Live by' and 'Philosophy made Flesh' (Lakoff and Johnson in both cases) that much language is rooted in fundamental metaphors based on bodily experience (and making neurological links co-opting the relevant neuronal gestalts of somatic experience which does seem to be borne out in emerging brain imaging research). We should note it is the role of iconicity that is being picked out here. This is telling us something about (to use the vocabulary of another school in semiotics) motivated signs and their availability for metaphorical usage. What would be interesting to place beside this would be to look at the way that the FLY signs are pressed into metaphorical usage; what are the salient connotative meanings that can be drawn from the signs that can, in turn, be pressed into extended usage. I'm aware that SLs would be fascinating to look at from this kind of linguistic point of view. I hope one day I may have a chance to find out more.

A Thinking Machine -metaphors for mind

A big chunk of late 20th century thinking about thinking/brains/minds was dominated by computational metaphors, and my informal recollection would say that this accelerated in the 80s as people increasingly had their own computers at home. So I was very interest to see this article about language which draws attention to the way that computational metaphor has influenced and been used in thinking about language: A Thinking Machine: On metaphors for mind | Child's Play here's how it works: "the mind is like a spreadsheet: a prefabricated architecture that follows a strict, rule-based program, that rigidly structures its inputs and outputs in just such a way."
So what's the alternative? Well, there have been some more serious attempts to dethrone this metaphor:

By this suggestion, when we hear or read language, the computational principles of this innate grammar conduct a series of logical operations, which parse the incoming stream according to its component parts, and so yield understanding.
But what if this is simply the wrong metaphor?

What if – say – language is more like a search engine? ....
A search engine is a probabilistic, predictive learning machine. Unlike spreadsheets, search engines do not engage with their input in a determinate, preprogrammed manner. Instead of rigidly structuring incoming information according to some prefabricated set of rules, they discover structure within information. ...
This metaphor gives rise to a fundamentally different view of language: one in which language acquisition relies on relatively simple – yet powerful – learning mechanisms, and in which language comprehension and production is fundamentally predictive, rather than determinate.

Organic vs mechanical metaphors

A couple of days ago, reading an Adult Education conference report, I discovered that there had been a question about a part of it entitled 'tools for education'. The challenge was whether we could find a more organic metaphor than the mechanical one employed there. I take it that the point is that 'tools' implicitly frame learners as machines and educators as mechanics. Or at least the classroom as a machine. There is an implication that the right application of tools and techniques will produce 'learning'. Of course it is more complex than that, and that is just the point. The kind of things that are complex are often organic. The point is that there isn't a simple input-output thing going on, rather several inputs running through a dynamical and interactive system producing a series of outputs which have statistical correlations but not inevitable ones.

Anyway, what organic metaphor could do the duty for what 'tools' attempts to capture and does so in a way that meaningfully captures something about the complex dynamical nature of the exercise of teaching and learning.

The only thing that I've managed to come up with is 'genes'; they are a simple finite set of things which combine to produce things of great complexity. However, they are not the only factor: we now know that they are affected in their expression by things like hormones and even other environmental factors. So while genes have a determinative role, they are not all that is at work.

Of course the difficulty may be that the metaphor is not immediately clear. 'Genes for education' doesn't sound like it's a metaphor yet. It tends to sound like it may be a literal statement about our genetic dispositions to learn.

So, back to the drawing board. Or do you think it could work? Or is there a better metaphor lurking out there?

Organic Organizational Design: "From our industrial age roots, organizations were thought to have clear boundaries and assumed an authoritarian, hierarchical pyramid like organizational structure. Our organizations reflected a mechanistic model. This was effective for the time since the need for responding to change was not as immediate. Access to information was not easy nor was the workforce as educated. Access to information and decision making was concentrated at the top. This authoritarian hierarchical model provided clarity, consistency, and control."

Metaphor and incarnation

Definitely worth thinking about, especially as it connects with the research on metaphor and language which in turn begins to connect with philosophy. Post Modern Christianity: The Future of the Church and Post Modern Ministry in the 21st Century: "we exist in metaphor. Metaphor meets us where we are. Indeed, God is more real in metaphor than in any previous theology or doctrine. As we increasingly weave the metaphoric web in which we are embedded, we will increasingly witness its signs of Truth.

The future belongs to the language of metaphor—or, more to the point, to the Presence of the Other within metaphor. And, as that Presence—that 'Word'—becomes 'flesh,' Christ returns to His rightful place in our postmodern world."