Games are fun. That’s why we play them. I remember when I was younger I used to love Monopoly. I used to always get the car because I always thought it was cool looking and I felt like I got around the board faster with. I was just thinking about this the other day as I was talking to a friend about why inequality makes complete sense and why we should never try to make things completely equal. Let me see if I can explain…
As I said, I’ve thought about this a little bit so I believe I can make a pretty convincing argument for the usefulness of inequality based on what we all learned from the game Monopoly. You see, the point of the game is to either own all the property or have all the money. Essentially you want your, opponents to be so broke that they can’t trade with you anymore and that, my friend, is a microcosm of what we call the Pareto distribution.
You may have heard of the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of the work is normally produced by 20% of the people. That’s called the Pareto principle. If you’re not familiar with the Pareto distribution/principle, it’s essentially an equation that reveals that more of the productivity in any basic system (even in nature) is normally only attributed to a small part of the group.
So what am I getting at here? Well in the game of Monopoly the ultimate end is zero. If society played out in its truest form, we would literally have a system where there was a small number of very productive people at the top that made the most money. Sound familiar?
Yes, life is unfair, nature is unfair. But it all depends on how you look at it. If a lion were to eat an impala (the animal, not the car), is it unfair? No. Because the lion has to eat and if he doesn’t the whole ecosystem can be thrown off because an inferior animal will begin to overpopulate the area and then you’ll have less grass, more car wrecks, and famine because the soil will be unstable. As you can probably imagine, you’d probably have a similarly bleak scenario if you were to let the lions overrun the area.
In summary, your view of equality might not be someone else’s. Equality really is based on a lot of factors, many of which, we have no way of measuring. With that in mind, the best way to seek equality in the game of life is not to worry about the other players so much and to worry about playing the best game you can and letting the results play out.
Jerry “gamer” Washington
P.S. In this day and age, it’s even easier to let the results speak for themselves. On the internet, you’re neither black nor white, nor rich or poor. We live in a completely different world than that of our grandparents, or even our parents, for that matter. It’s all a matter of execution…Talk soon!
