"It might well have been called the 'Game of Life,' as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth."

A 1939 edition of Lizzie's game. Today, The Landlord's Game is widely recognized as the prototype for Monopoly. But, Parker Brothers' popularized version left out much of the educational content from the original. Lizzie's version could be played 2 ways ~ one set of rules led to a single monopolist winner; in the other, all players worked together to find a way that everyone could win...

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Lizzie was persuaded by Henry George's immensely popular 1879 book ~ an argument for how to address the great economic paradox of the industrial age: rising poverty amidst advancing wealth. Henry's solution? A "single" land value tax based on the belief that land and natural resources should be commonly owned. The single tax would work to gradually regulate unstable economies by returning much of the value on resources that should be publicly owned to the goverment's coffers. Lizzie invented The Landlord's Game as a fun way to teach the theories behind Henry's several-hundred page book ~ an impressive abridgement!

Robert Schalkenbach Foundation | © all rights reserved