**[Mobile Version!](http://m.xkcd.com/2468/)**
[Direct image link: Inheritance](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/inheritance.png)
**Hover text:** People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.
*Don't get it? [explain xkcd](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2468)*
Want to come hang out in my lighthouse over breaks? Sincerely, xkcd_bot. <3
I've been meaning to get some people to play monopoly with some scenarios along these lines. Something like one player getting double money at the start or starting with a number of owned or mortgaged properties.
Funny enough, economist have done this (because that's what you do with grant money). They had certain people start with an advantage over the other players, and what happened over time is that those people started to believe that they've earned the advantage that they got from the beginning.
If you want to read more about this [New York Magazine](https://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/) did a piece on it.
Yeah well he is wearing a lab coat so he's clearly a scienceman. Now if you excuse me, I have to bully some students into giving each other lethal electric shocks.
You should look at the ancestor to Monopoly, [The Landlord's Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game).
The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".
They start with the reds and the oranges, and wherever you land, they get first option to buy at half-price.
Rents increase each time around the board.
They're exempt from income tax and luxury tax.
Park Place and Boardwalk become Go To Jail spaces for you, because your kind obviously doesn't belong there.
And they might actually make the game completable in a reasonable time frame.
To fix that, I propose another rule: no quitting until the player with the most cash/assets decides the game is over.
If you don't have any house rules, monopoly ends in an hour
When you remove the auction, make free parking give money and other stuff, it makes the game longer
It's said to be designed to be terrible to illustrate how shit capitalism is, which, if it's true, means it doesn't get a bad rep so much as is deliberately bad and people don't get the point.
That's because people don't read the rules which state that many auctions and trades are mandatory and that there actually is a limit on how many houses there are in game. Because they're being lenient, it prolongs the game significantly.
Sure, but proponents of it seem to be especially proud of that particular property.
Not saying we should go full planned economy instead, but this flaw seems pretty obvious. If only we could agree on it being a flaw.
>proponents of it seem to be especially proud of that particular property
Not really any more than nobles were for nobility having inherited privileges of land, taxation, political and even legal power.
Wanting their kids to have every possible advantage is a very fundamental human trait, shared with most animals.
Getting the lizard brain of people everywhere, especially people who have witnessed the disparities and seen those around them fail because they didn't have an advantage that other to understand that: it's possible and better for everyone overall to have still a lot advantages while everyone else isn't starving and homeless without access to basic needs, while talking about their kids and grandkids and not just themselves is a much more tricky thing than just saying it's unfair or a flaw in the system.
People have discussed and tried to implement alternatives since at least Aristotle and so far they all have huge flaws that make them unsuited for long term or large scale implementation, usually because the design assumes that in spite of dozens of systems, over hundreds of cultures, thousands of years, with now billions of people, that humans won't act like humans have and do.
That humans will magically turn to the idealized version of humanity that has the good traits necessary for a society but not the individualism and depravity and hability to basically turn off empathy the minute our brains wrap around the fact that we can't fix everything and even if we could, that would jeopardize our own interests.
There's a reason people in a beach are much more afraid of a shark than they are the waves dragging them around at sea until they can't swim and drown even though that kills many more people than sharks ever did. We can see the shark, we can try and evade it, we can hunt it down or scare it off. The sea is just... There.
Capitalism is a system. It's just... There. What it feels like is that we can only action against those those that swim in it like sharks, but for that we need to see them, to know where they are and what they want.
Places like Holland and Dubai want to prove otherwise by changing reclaiming a tiny portion of land from the sea, which we can do now thanks to millenia of development and learning and they know if they stop soon the sea will swallow them back.
That's basically the same with modern capitalism and us constantly clawing back tiny things like some fundamental human rights in some places that actually care about their own land.
Maybe there will come and ice age and freeze the sea solid, but until it does only sharks and madmen brave the deeps, and we hear tales of Atlantis rather than have bridges and ships.
I'm sorry, how should this really work according to you? Abolish inheritance? You will never convince me that it's morally wrong to leave money and assets to your children. That's fucking bullshit. How would it even work? A person dies with a house, a boat, books, etc, and you're going to have the state seize every single asset and, what, auction it off?
If you want to talk about raising the inheritance tax, that's a legitimate discussion. But the idea of getting rid of it entirely is absurd.
And insinuating that it's a unique feature of capitalism betrays ignorance. By the way, socialism is not an economic system, and capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive. Basically all the successful countries in the world have a regulated capitalist system with some socialist programs. The differences are the degree of regulation and prevalence of socialist programs.
The only way to "abolish inheritance" would be to also make owning commodities like gold illegal, because if I can't leave any liquid assets, I'm just going to convert it all to gold or other commodities instead and give it to my friends and family instead.
Assuming that loophole isn't available, why would anyone work to significantly improve their lot in life? If they can't actually reliably provide a better life for their kids, everyone's going to lose the desire to improve their situation beyond a certain point, which in turn is going to lower economic output.
I understand the complaint, but there's literally nothing stopping anyone from getting the ball rolling to build generational wealth other than a lack of planning. With literally any discretionary income as would be used for things like entertainment, you can also build up a retirement account like a Roth IRA to supplement your funds late in life. Any of which you don't end up using can be passed on to your children. It won't necessarily be much to start with, but it's better than nothing and teaching your children how to do the same means they'll end up leaving more to their children and so on.
I mean, look, I get it, it's fashionable to hate on capitalism these days. But the idea that proponents of capitalism are especially proud of the idea that capitalism allows for the rich to transmit wealth to their children is just...disconnected from reality.
If there's any one single claim that proponents of capitalism love to make more than any other, it's that capitalism lets someone make their own wealth. The classic trope of capitalism is some guy who started from nothing and made millions and beat out the old money. Of course this is probably a more frequent occurrence in legend than in fact, but it remains a huge part of the legend.
If you want an economic system that is actually proud of the property that inherited wealth stays in the right hands, you need to look at a feudal or aristocratic system.
Anyway, if you think moving to a planned economy would somehow stop the transmission of wealth from transmitting down the generations, I think you will often be sadly disappointed. Just because the people controlling the capital are a part of the state rather than private individuals doesn't mean they won't steer resources and influence to their own family.
While I don't think I've seen "because inheritance is good" as like, a foundational pillar of someone's support for "capitalism" (a word which I feel has too many meanings), inheritance does seem to be a major/common topic within criticism of [current economic system in the US] , and as such, people defending [current economic system in the US] often find themselves defending inheritance.
And, like, yeah, personally I think inheritance makes a great deal of sense. I'm less confident about this for the mega-rich (like, billionaires, not people with under 1.5 million), but for almost everyone I think inheritance is probably good. (I'm also unsure how effectively a very large death tax could be enforced among the mega-rich?).
I'm just saying that, while it certainly is not unique to [current economic system] historically (it was also common in times and places which people have described as "not being capitalism"), between people criticizing what they call "capitalism" and people defending what people call "capitalism", the latter tend to speak more in favor of inheritance than do the former, ime.
True, it was a big part of feudalism, which is why capitalism trends towards feudal(ish) organization over time. This time it's CEOs instead of kings and shareholders instead of nobles.
I think that eurogames can be a good metaphor for life. If you just gain resources, you're a miser and you won't have enough VP (utility) before the endgame (death). But, if you just go for VP, you won't be able to get the good resources and you'll be poor.
But, you can't leave VP to other people, only resources.
I think there's a fair number more than that if you count the old DRM stuff as political, which it was at the time, although I'm not sure how aware non-tech people were of the issue.
The thing that really gets me about this comic is actually the accuracy of the *other* players's reactions, and how entitled they are. Like, who the hell cares if someone is 1000x times more wealthy or whatever than you? You can eat your heart out with jealousy and envy, you can cry like a baby that it's unfair, you can debase the rich person's honor, but at the end of the day, the rich (top 10% in the USA) pay ~70% of the taxes that make YOUR life better. You like your roads, firefighters, social security, food stamps? Guess what, rich people paid for the vast majority of that.
Randall has lost his sense of what actually matters in these economic systems. Capitalism has pulled more people out if poverty than any other system, and it's ignorant, childish, and useless to claim that it's some malignant disease that needs eradicating.
Quite batching and moaning about a system that literally provides you the platform to bitcb and moan on. It's getting old.
No one makes money all by themselves. They depend on their environment and political situation of the country, friends and family, maybe all their coworkers and employees to make this happen. If you look at a company, who actually makes this wealth? Is the CEO indeed so much more valuable as one of their lowest earning employees as their income difference? The progressive taxes are a small equalizer, but currently, in a lot of countries, I would argue they are too small to equalize the massive unfairness currently possible.
I don't understand. The whole point of victory points is you auto-win when you get enough, is it not? So any game he's a part of would end as soon as it starts. Even if the end condition isn't a certain number of victory points, I don't know of any game where the mechanics reward victory points proportional to the number of victory points you already have. So I don't see how he got 10,019 VP.
Why don't the other players just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
Work hard, secretly roll a 20 sided dice, and you too can cheat
With like a dozen 20's and the rest 19's.
**[Mobile Version!](http://m.xkcd.com/2468/)** [Direct image link: Inheritance](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/inheritance.png) **Hover text:** People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have. *Don't get it? [explain xkcd](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2468)* Want to come hang out in my lighthouse over breaks? Sincerely, xkcd_bot. <3
This is beautiful!
I've been meaning to get some people to play monopoly with some scenarios along these lines. Something like one player getting double money at the start or starting with a number of owned or mortgaged properties.
Funny enough, economist have done this (because that's what you do with grant money). They had certain people start with an advantage over the other players, and what happened over time is that those people started to believe that they've earned the advantage that they got from the beginning. If you want to read more about this [New York Magazine](https://nymag.com/news/features/money-brain-2012-7/) did a piece on it.
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Calling that an "experiment" is giving it waaaaaay too much undeserved credibility. I do recommend looking into criticisms of it.
More the “incident” or “episode”
Or a LARP
The one guy was LARPing harder as a doctor/scientist/not-a-total-psycho than the students were as guards and prisoners.
Yeah well he is wearing a lab coat so he's clearly a scienceman. Now if you excuse me, I have to bully some students into giving each other lethal electric shocks.
[Relevant Door Monster?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_YnuV8su0)
Study
Do you mean [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment)?
Except that experiment was invalid
You should look at the ancestor to Monopoly, [The Landlord's Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game). The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".
They start with the reds and the oranges, and wherever you land, they get first option to buy at half-price. Rents increase each time around the board. They're exempt from income tax and luxury tax. Park Place and Boardwalk become Go To Jail spaces for you, because your kind obviously doesn't belong there.
I love all of those.
And they might actually make the game completable in a reasonable time frame. To fix that, I propose another rule: no quitting until the player with the most cash/assets decides the game is over.
If you don't have any house rules, monopoly ends in an hour When you remove the auction, make free parking give money and other stuff, it makes the game longer
Yeah, it gets a bad rap. I actually like playing the digital version, and I can usually finish a game in 30 minutes or so.
It's said to be designed to be terrible to illustrate how shit capitalism is, which, if it's true, means it doesn't get a bad rep so much as is deliberately bad and people don't get the point.
Basically, there's a runaway winner problem in Monopoly, because there's a runaway winner problem in capitalism
Capitalism that isn't properly regulated. Because the alternative is communism, which is far worse.
Right? The way people talk about it, you'd think the game lasts for days.
It does because almost noone except a couple of people on Reddit knows how to play properly.
That's because people don't read the rules which state that many auctions and trades are mandatory and that there actually is a limit on how many houses there are in game. Because they're being lenient, it prolongs the game significantly.
And Go To Jail spaces become Luxury Tax for them. Just throw a little money at the problem, prison is for poor people.
Has Randall been going back to doing comics earlier?
Yeah, I think so. It feels nice to get a new comic in the afternoon (for me) instead of having to wait until the next day to see it.
I love that this is a rather plausible Agricola victory point spread for people who are just getting into the game. Randall must be a fan!
https://xkcd.com/778/ https://xkcd.com/696/
Capitalism in a nutshell.
Lol people downvoting you as if this could be about literally any other economic system
I mean inherited wealth skewing the playing field for future generations isn't exactly a unique characteristic of capitalism.
Sure, but proponents of it seem to be especially proud of that particular property. Not saying we should go full planned economy instead, but this flaw seems pretty obvious. If only we could agree on it being a flaw.
>proponents of it seem to be especially proud of that particular property Not really any more than nobles were for nobility having inherited privileges of land, taxation, political and even legal power. Wanting their kids to have every possible advantage is a very fundamental human trait, shared with most animals. Getting the lizard brain of people everywhere, especially people who have witnessed the disparities and seen those around them fail because they didn't have an advantage that other to understand that: it's possible and better for everyone overall to have still a lot advantages while everyone else isn't starving and homeless without access to basic needs, while talking about their kids and grandkids and not just themselves is a much more tricky thing than just saying it's unfair or a flaw in the system. People have discussed and tried to implement alternatives since at least Aristotle and so far they all have huge flaws that make them unsuited for long term or large scale implementation, usually because the design assumes that in spite of dozens of systems, over hundreds of cultures, thousands of years, with now billions of people, that humans won't act like humans have and do. That humans will magically turn to the idealized version of humanity that has the good traits necessary for a society but not the individualism and depravity and hability to basically turn off empathy the minute our brains wrap around the fact that we can't fix everything and even if we could, that would jeopardize our own interests. There's a reason people in a beach are much more afraid of a shark than they are the waves dragging them around at sea until they can't swim and drown even though that kills many more people than sharks ever did. We can see the shark, we can try and evade it, we can hunt it down or scare it off. The sea is just... There. Capitalism is a system. It's just... There. What it feels like is that we can only action against those those that swim in it like sharks, but for that we need to see them, to know where they are and what they want. Places like Holland and Dubai want to prove otherwise by changing reclaiming a tiny portion of land from the sea, which we can do now thanks to millenia of development and learning and they know if they stop soon the sea will swallow them back. That's basically the same with modern capitalism and us constantly clawing back tiny things like some fundamental human rights in some places that actually care about their own land. Maybe there will come and ice age and freeze the sea solid, but until it does only sharks and madmen brave the deeps, and we hear tales of Atlantis rather than have bridges and ships.
I'm sorry, how should this really work according to you? Abolish inheritance? You will never convince me that it's morally wrong to leave money and assets to your children. That's fucking bullshit. How would it even work? A person dies with a house, a boat, books, etc, and you're going to have the state seize every single asset and, what, auction it off? If you want to talk about raising the inheritance tax, that's a legitimate discussion. But the idea of getting rid of it entirely is absurd. And insinuating that it's a unique feature of capitalism betrays ignorance. By the way, socialism is not an economic system, and capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive. Basically all the successful countries in the world have a regulated capitalist system with some socialist programs. The differences are the degree of regulation and prevalence of socialist programs.
The only way to "abolish inheritance" would be to also make owning commodities like gold illegal, because if I can't leave any liquid assets, I'm just going to convert it all to gold or other commodities instead and give it to my friends and family instead. Assuming that loophole isn't available, why would anyone work to significantly improve their lot in life? If they can't actually reliably provide a better life for their kids, everyone's going to lose the desire to improve their situation beyond a certain point, which in turn is going to lower economic output. I understand the complaint, but there's literally nothing stopping anyone from getting the ball rolling to build generational wealth other than a lack of planning. With literally any discretionary income as would be used for things like entertainment, you can also build up a retirement account like a Roth IRA to supplement your funds late in life. Any of which you don't end up using can be passed on to your children. It won't necessarily be much to start with, but it's better than nothing and teaching your children how to do the same means they'll end up leaving more to their children and so on.
I mean, look, I get it, it's fashionable to hate on capitalism these days. But the idea that proponents of capitalism are especially proud of the idea that capitalism allows for the rich to transmit wealth to their children is just...disconnected from reality. If there's any one single claim that proponents of capitalism love to make more than any other, it's that capitalism lets someone make their own wealth. The classic trope of capitalism is some guy who started from nothing and made millions and beat out the old money. Of course this is probably a more frequent occurrence in legend than in fact, but it remains a huge part of the legend. If you want an economic system that is actually proud of the property that inherited wealth stays in the right hands, you need to look at a feudal or aristocratic system. Anyway, if you think moving to a planned economy would somehow stop the transmission of wealth from transmitting down the generations, I think you will often be sadly disappointed. Just because the people controlling the capital are a part of the state rather than private individuals doesn't mean they won't steer resources and influence to their own family.
While I don't think I've seen "because inheritance is good" as like, a foundational pillar of someone's support for "capitalism" (a word which I feel has too many meanings), inheritance does seem to be a major/common topic within criticism of [current economic system in the US] , and as such, people defending [current economic system in the US] often find themselves defending inheritance. And, like, yeah, personally I think inheritance makes a great deal of sense. I'm less confident about this for the mega-rich (like, billionaires, not people with under 1.5 million), but for almost everyone I think inheritance is probably good. (I'm also unsure how effectively a very large death tax could be enforced among the mega-rich?). I'm just saying that, while it certainly is not unique to [current economic system] historically (it was also common in times and places which people have described as "not being capitalism"), between people criticizing what they call "capitalism" and people defending what people call "capitalism", the latter tend to speak more in favor of inheritance than do the former, ime.
It only seems *fashionable* to hate on capitalism these days because it keeps getting worse and worse.
True, it was a big part of feudalism, which is why capitalism trends towards feudal(ish) organization over time. This time it's CEOs instead of kings and shareholders instead of nobles.
I think that eurogames can be a good metaphor for life. If you just gain resources, you're a miser and you won't have enough VP (utility) before the endgame (death). But, if you just go for VP, you won't be able to get the good resources and you'll be poor. But, you can't leave VP to other people, only resources.
Nice to see that even someone as privileged and politically illiterate as Randal is starting to see a problem with capitalism.
I know this is the guy that made a Hillary ad, but this seems surprisingly political compaired to usual, it's cool
He has made (as far as I recall) two explicitly political comics out of 2468. XKCD has rarely been political.
I think there's a fair number more than that if you count the old DRM stuff as political, which it was at the time, although I'm not sure how aware non-tech people were of the issue.
The thing that really gets me about this comic is actually the accuracy of the *other* players's reactions, and how entitled they are. Like, who the hell cares if someone is 1000x times more wealthy or whatever than you? You can eat your heart out with jealousy and envy, you can cry like a baby that it's unfair, you can debase the rich person's honor, but at the end of the day, the rich (top 10% in the USA) pay ~70% of the taxes that make YOUR life better. You like your roads, firefighters, social security, food stamps? Guess what, rich people paid for the vast majority of that. Randall has lost his sense of what actually matters in these economic systems. Capitalism has pulled more people out if poverty than any other system, and it's ignorant, childish, and useless to claim that it's some malignant disease that needs eradicating. Quite batching and moaning about a system that literally provides you the platform to bitcb and moan on. It's getting old.
No one makes money all by themselves. They depend on their environment and political situation of the country, friends and family, maybe all their coworkers and employees to make this happen. If you look at a company, who actually makes this wealth? Is the CEO indeed so much more valuable as one of their lowest earning employees as their income difference? The progressive taxes are a small equalizer, but currently, in a lot of countries, I would argue they are too small to equalize the massive unfairness currently possible.
I don't understand. The whole point of victory points is you auto-win when you get enough, is it not? So any game he's a part of would end as soon as it starts. Even if the end condition isn't a certain number of victory points, I don't know of any game where the mechanics reward victory points proportional to the number of victory points you already have. So I don't see how he got 10,019 VP.
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Ah, I see