Monopoly isn’t just a game. It’s a mirror. And what it shows us, game after game, generation after generation, is perhaps what we would rather not see: how easily we accept the unacceptable, as long as we are on the right side of the board.

In this mirror, we contemplate an economy of terrifying purity in a world without a safety net. No form of redistribution tempers the brutality of the market. No progressive tax to curb accumulation. No welfare state to cushion the falls.

A world where every profit stays private and every loss remains personal. The player who, thanks to a lucky early roll, picks up Park Place builds a cumulative advantage that nothing will ever correct. Every rent collected lets them buy more, every property increases their future income. The snowball effect of capital, with no mechanism whatsoever to stop it.

This model is structurally unstable. As in any fully deregulated market, the ecosystem only survives as long as everyone keeps enough cash to go on playing. But that is precisely what the logic of the game prevents. As the weak fall, the flows of money dry up. The game doesn’t end in the glory of a prosperous system, but in the death throes of an economy collapsing in on itself.

Monopoly is not a celebration of capitalism: it is a machine for manufacturing losers. Its fate is written in its very name: monopoly, from the Greek monos (alone) and polein (to sell).

That millions of Americans ruined by the Great Depression rushed to buy a game celebrating property speculation says something dizzying about our collective psyche. Faced with economic collapse, with foreclosures and evictions, America wasn’t dreaming of a fairer world. It wasn’t looking for an alternative. It was dreaming of revenge. Monopoly offered everyone the imaginary chance to be the landlord rather than the evicted, the creditor rather than the debtor, the one collecting the rent rather than the one paying it.

The British turned Boardwalk into Mayfair and Park Place into Park Lane; the French made them the Rue de la Paix and the Champs-Élysées. London streets, Paris streets, rather than Atlantic City. Are we really any different? In our living rooms, around our family tables, we replay the same drama with the same fervour. We build our red hotels on Mayfair or on the grand boulevards of Paris with the same glee that drove the Americans of 1935. The game crossed the Atlantic, but its message survived intact: be the landlord rather than the tenant, own rather than be owned.

What Lizzie Magie designed as a warning has become our implicit mental model. Monopoly teaches us that the more you own, the more you receive. That property is the one and only source of wealth. That only assets protect you from ruin. It doesn’t teach value creation but pure rent extraction: set yourself up on a road everyone has to take, put up barriers (houses and hotels), and fleece everyone who passes.

More troubling still: we celebrate the winner. The one who took everything, who left everyone else penniless. In what other context would we applaud someone for bankrupting their own family? Elizabeth Magie designed this scenario as a teaching nightmare, a reductio ad absurdum of the dangers of concentrated wealth.

Next time you roll the dice, put up your red hotels on Mayfair or Boardwalk, and collect a crippling rent from an opponent on the brink of bankruptcy, stop for a moment. Remember the woman who tried to warn us. Watch how power, even make-believe power, changes the way you behave. How wealth, even in pastel-coloured paper 500 notes, changes the way you treat the other players.

And perhaps that is the most chilling lesson of Monopoly, the one that should make our blood run cold: we know exactly what we are doing. We know the game is rigged, that the ending is written in advance, that only one will win and everyone else will lose. We know the relentless mechanics that lead from equality at the start to domination at the end.

We know. And we play anyway.