Play Monopoly Online

Monopoly: The World's Most Famous Game--And How It Got That Way
$14.95
When I picked up this book, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it. I thought it was going to be a book just about the game and its glory. While I was intrigued because Monopoly is my favorite game, I figured I would give it a shot. And boy was I surprised.

The book starts off with the Author in search of the history of the game. Which leads him not Monopoly, but to two key figures; Henry George and Elizabeth Magie Phillips. Henry George wrote a socialist book about the Single Tax Theory in his book Progress and Poverty in 1879. Ms. Phillips developed a game called the "Landlord's Game" in 1903 based off Mr. George's theory. This interesting beginning started a revolution that we know today.

While many game manufactures like Parker Brothers would not carry the game, Lizzie would patent it and give teach friends how to play the game. Some investors decide to build on a parcel of land to test the theory out where Lizzie sent them a copy of the game. The town was Arden, DE.

As she taught her friends, they taught others and it eventually made it to a class room at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to teach students economics and the evils of Monopolies. As students were taught this game, it migrated to other colleges and university including Columbia University. It started to become popular by word of mouth.

The Landlord Game went through many modifications to become Monopoly. The Atlantic City theme did not appear until1930's When Dorothy and Cyril Harvey started to put the names of the streets and avenues of the town. They played this game with Charles and Olivia Todd who in turn showed Charles Darrow the game. Darrow would go on to popularize the game and to get Parker Brothers to start publishing the games years later. He even took credit for inventing the game we now know.

The only thing I did not like about the book was that he spent a lot of time on tournament play toward the end of the book. It was exciting, but it really wasn't need to complete the story of the game. I would have left it out.

Philip Orbanes not only adds the colorful history of the game, but he includes a knowledge of ecconomics, politics, history, all background stories to the book, making more than a book about the game, but a book about the United States and its rich history. This is a valuable book for everyone because it shows us what we actual miss in school about these subjects, but adds a sense of fun and reality to it. It was a joy to read and learn about this great game.


I highly recommend this book.
Enjoy

Monopoly: The Story Behind the World's Best-Selling Game
$19.95
If you are looking for a guidebook on developing strategies on winning Monopoly games, look elsewhere. This book does a fantastic job of explaining the history behind the streets and places printed on a Classic Monopoly gameboard. The postcards are diverse and even cover Baltic Avenue. The postcards are from when the Monopoly game was issued nationally and earlier. This book makes a great present for someone who enjoys playing Monopoly and wants to more about the background and real-world history of the locations on the traditional game.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
$30.00
I see two ways to approach this book:

1) Fight yourself through 247 pages of low quality discussion of intellectual property rights to then finally discover 15 readable pages (subsection "The Good" p.248). The experience must be similar to the feelings of men after the 1000 years of middle age with every text written taking the belief (here: intellectual property is equal to monopoly) for granted and then discover the time of open-ended thoughts during the enlightenment (The Good: true analysis considering all possible options. Discussing advantages and disadvantages).

2) Read only the subsection "The Good", then the first 30 pages and finally the first 5 pages of each chapter - this should give you enough taste of the book. Most probably the online version should be enough for this approach.

As my rating is that low I asked myself, is that simply because I have a different opinion? And I believe this is not it. It is the low quality of the argumentation.

The main topic of the book is that the markets for intellectual properties are always markets with a monopoly of the owner, because a specific book, music piece or software is only offered by a single person/company. This is basically saying that there is not a market for e.g. music, but there are millions of small markets for each and every piece. In this case also selling cars, homes etc., basically all non bulk commodity markets are dominated by monopolies, as there is only one seller of a specific home, car brand, etc. These few examples show already that this "private" market definition is simply inappropriate. But it is the basis of the whole book. For the discussion of the book it is important that the authors not even mention this possible counter argument. And this is typical for this book as the authors forget often about the many other consequences of their thesis. So yes, monopolies are bad for a market, but many intellectual property markets are not more dominated by monopolies than other "normal" markets: No one forces you to buy a specific piece of music, book, software, home, car - there are many alternatives. The classification of markets is actually not discussed in the book.

And in terms of rating the book, it is even worse: the argumentation of the book is basically a trick. They start with the term monopoly, as no one will question that monopolies are bad for markets. They then link it to intellectual property - based on their private definition of a market. Then they ask the reader repeatedly: Do you agree that monopolies are bad? The uncritical reader walks into the trap: "sure, I am against monopolies" and the book creates the connection: "so you are against intellectual property rights". And this whole argumentation is basically buyers trying to get a lower price - a natural feeling in a market economy. That is actually not better (or worse) than sellers trying to increase the price. But the whole story is actually setup to question the market economy, hidden under the term monopoly... they basically say that the prices created in a market economy are unfair... again ok, if you want to vote for socialism, but hidden under the discussion of intellectual monopoly makes me select a low rating.

I personally believe there is actually a valid argument regarding the difficulties in pricing of pharmaceuticals (The book discusses the problem of AIDS medication too expensive for African patients). And yes, you might actually see a monopoly if there is only one working medication for a single diagnosis. But if you challenge the pricing in this market, then you are basically challenging the market economy, and not the patents. The same would be true for medical technology in general that is not easily available to poor countries. So we could discuss, if we shouldn't for ethical reasons better use a state driven approach for the medical area. But the book would then need to have a different title. For music, books, all the other intellectual properties this challenge is clearly not at all relevant (as they actually agree in the "golden" 15 pages). It is the mixing of topics what makes the 247 pages low quality - the simplicity of their analysis. It is more on the level of late evening bar conversations: If "they" would only change this, the world would be a much better place. With simplicity I mean e.g. continuously mixing the whole spectrum of intellectual works into one discussion: There are major differences between the one end music pieces (that are traded in a large concurrent market) and the other end, a potential "one and only" drug offering healing of a specific life-threatening disease.

They say that the protection is slowing down the evolution. Their argumentation: Look at times of Shakespeare. There was no protection and he was still successful, thus we need no copyright. The more general view on this is simply omitted: The period from the 18th century (when men started to protect intellectual property) until today is without question the most productive time of mankind in terms of intellectual work (before that time way above 95% percent of the population was forced to work in agriculture to survive). This is clearly only a correlation and not a causality, but wouldn't you expect a book like this to at least touch this question? How much faster could the intellectual evolution have been (if the intellectual property rights have slowed down the evolution)? Would we have been on the moon at the end of the 19th century? Would that have been a better world?

Also typical for this book are discussions of an example with invalid conclusions, because the conclusion is made on a different level than the analysis. They've analyzed the revenue from E-books on a website (not talking about the weak statistical concept, only looking on the publicly available best seller list, not the full sales numbers). And found that the E-books without a technical copy-protection have higher sales figures, even though those are also available for free on the internet. Their Conclusion: Copyright is not needed, the authors would earn the same money without a copy-right. Clearly this is an invalid conclusion: A possible conclusion could be that a technical protection has no direct impact on the sales figures. But based on this small data set you could neither generalize the findings nor you can talk about the implication for the copyright - if the copyright protection would be abolished there is no reason anymore to not copy for free - even for people not using the free version today following the rules, also if there isn't a policeman setting behind them.

In the 15 readable pages they finally scratch the surface of the real difficulties of intellectual property - and open up as well that they have difficulties to understand the specifics. Referencing to the normal world of properties is similar to people trying to understand the narrowness of space based on their experience in the real world: "But what is in the space after the end of space?" Answer: "Sorry, but there is no space as the space ands - the question is simply invalid". Similarly the virtual characteristics of intellectual property make it difficult to understand that the concept only works if the rights stay with the owner - completely different from real world properties. This wasn't a real problem for "normal" people as long as the intellectual value was always "hidden" in a physical thing - the price of a record was never the price of the physical matter, but it was at least something tangible. Now with the digitalization and internet we've stripped of all references to the real world. We look at the naked intellectual value. And we see that people are actually not feeling guilty using it without paying the creator - they even state that they have a right to enjoy the music for free. Enforcements of intellectual property are clearly only addressing the symptoms. This is the real problem to be discussed, but only shortly touched in the 15 pages.

A question that is actually discussed in the book is `how to earn money' without protection. They derive an answer from sales figures of state reports that are available for free online and sold as well as a paper version, and the sales of unprotected E-books that are also illegally available. Their analysis: There are a lot of copies for free, but there are still people that pay for the book - as long it is a reasonable price. In real world this would feel really strange: Imagine a market place, some people pay for the potatoes and some not - as they like. And the message for the dealers: You should be happy what you got. How is that actually in terms of fairness? Trading means actually sharing the costs to create the music, book, etc. Should we really use for intellectual property trade - _the_ real human trade good - this stochastic, free choice paying? So this is again a more general question. If one wants to vote for this concept, then this should be discussed independent of intellectual property.
(I have decided to give the book 2 stars instead of 1 star - my content rating - because the authors and the publisher accepted this stochastic payment for this book, offering the book also free online)

#Martin

Monopoly Rules: How to Find, Capture, and Control the Most Lucrative Markets in Any Business
$25.95
Chapter 4, about the fall of Sustainable Competitive Advantage and the rise of Situational Monopoly, was worth reading. But most of the rest of the book is fluff.

If I had had to pay full price for this book, I would have given it two stars. There is a useful concept here in chapter 4, worth the fiver I paid for my copy used.

All too many business books, especially from first-time authors, fall into this trap. They take their model, which has some utility in some limited space, and arbitrarily expand it to cover the entire business universe. Such is the case here.

Fortunately, as of late 2007, this book seems to be available as a remainder only from third-party sellers. Find a cheap copy and read chapter 4!