Fun and Games With the Morbidly Rich
Some of you didn't play enough board games as a kid and it shows
I would love to play a few games of Trouble with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and all the rest of those folks.
You probably played this game as a kid. It’s the one with the “pop-o-matic” device in the middle of the board.
If you played Trouble very many times, you probably remember the frustrating fact that you cannot get on the board until you roll a 6. I can remember a few times when I played that game and never rolled a 6, and had to watch someone else win the game while I never got on the board at all.
Here’s how that feels
You keep trying, and you’re doing the exact same thing your friend is doing, but they’re racing around having fun and getting closer to their goal while you’re getting nowhere. Without a doubt, Trouble is a game that teaches you the truth about life.
Some people roll a 6 on the day they were born — their family of origin is healthy and loving and financially secure. Others take a while to roll a 6, but they diligently keep trying and they do OK. But some people never roll a 6, and it might be because they didn’t try hard enough or because nobody ever taught them the importance of rolling a 6. It might also be sheer bad luck.
Life, of course, is not entirely a game of chance, but neither is it the case that everyone gets exactly what they deserve. Yet we’ve arranged our society as if that were true. We insist success comes from intelligence, hard work and talent and we ignore the large role of luck.
Playing a few rounds of Trouble might clue these people in. Or Clue, for that matter. Or The Game of Life. Or Monopoly. Board games for all!
When he was a kid, my son used to get upset playing The Game of Life. Each time he was made to pay a tax or fee of some kind, he’d steam. “Every time I get a little bit of money, I immediately have to pay for something!” he’d complain.
“Yes, it’s pretty accurate that way,” I said.
It was especially frustrating if you couldn’t get a job that paid well or if you were forced to pay too much for your house, which is a common problem both in Life and in life.
The winner-take-all game
Did Elon Musk deserve $50 billion? He thought so, and he got it. If you’re like me, you’re starting to think you were not nearly aggressive enough the last time you tried to negotiate a raise.
Do billions of others deserve to struggle?
Some people think the billionaires deserve their wealth because they’re smarter or harder-working than everyone else. But for the most part, the ultra-wealthy are just people who were in the right place at the right time, and they have a personality type that attracts them to power and money.
These people are smart, but they aren’t necessarily geniuses. The reason they are amassing billions of dollars as opposed to a few hundred thousand isn’t superiority. To a large degree, it’s luck.
This is heresy, of course
The official line is that America is the land of opportunity where everyone can succeed if they work hard enough, and if you did not succeed, it’s your own damn fault. We implicitly believe that rich people are inherently smarter — even if that rich person inherited his wealth, keeps going bankrupt and often speaks gibberish, we think he’d make a great president!
The ultra-wealthy almost invariably believe they deserve their wealth, which isn’t surprising. If you’re gobbling down big slices of pie while others starve, you need to believe you earned it.
An interesting 2020 study from The Journal of Politics concluded: “Affluent Americans were more likely than others to tie economic outcomes to intelligence and hard work, and the top 1% were unique in emphasizing both choices and genes as causes of those traits.”
An interesting 2024 thought from my brain concluded: “Those people are not as smart and special as they think they are.”
We produce plenty of wealth in this country, but we have set up the rules so that most of it is funneled upward into a very few pockets. We could easily shift things around so that extra hard work and risk is still rewarded but not to the point it is now. A winner-take-all system doesn’t serve society very well.
It’s not just a matter of fairness
A growing underclass represents a danger to everyone. It’s also a huge waste of human potential: If you are living in a tent, you are too busy trying to survive to contribute very much to society. And if you think people living in poverty don’t have talents society could use, shame on you. Get out of your bubble.
Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a maid and at other unskilled labor while researching her classic book about the working class, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She said in all the jobs she worked during that project, not one person ever commented that she seemed too smart or educated to be doing unskilled labor. This is a woman who earned a Ph.D in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University.
You might assume that one of her supervisors at the places where she worked would have noticed how intelligent she was and maybe offered her a better position, but it never happened.
It’s been my experience that people make assumptions about people’s intelligence and abilities based on what kind of job they have. That nobody noticed the intelligence of the Ph.D. scrubbing toilets is not surprising to me; neither is it surprising to me that people tend to assume anybody dealing with homelessness probably has nothing to offer society.
I would love to see Musk, Zuck and Bezos playing Trouble with some working class people. They would win some games and lose others. Imagine any of these guys not being able to roll a 6 and get on the board even though he imagines himself an Übermensch.
These guys are smart, but would they be smart enough to make the connection? Or would they become angry and complain that the game is unfair?
The game is, indeed, unfair. The very existence of billionaires proves it.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.
I'm grappling personally with this very question,, which is one of morality.
My son told me about this recently. In the video game Cities: Skylines II the issue of high rent got so bad the game developers had to eliminate landlords. From Wired: "The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb."