Elizabeth Magie
Georgist game designer (1866–1948) who patented The Landlord's Game (1904) to teach George's rent critique — the game that, stripped of its Georgist lesson, became Monopoly. The wiki's clearest story of the movement's ideas entering popular culture anonymously.
Overview
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie (1866–1948) was a Georgist writer and game designer who patented The Landlord's Game in 1904 — a board game explicitly built to teach Henry George's argument that rent enriches landowners while impoverishing tenants.[1] Her design had two rule sets: a "monopolist" game where players win by bankrupting rivals, and a "prosperity" (single-tax) variant where land rent flows to the common pot. The monopolist half, folk-copied for decades, was commercialized by Parker Brothers in 1935 as Monopoly — with Magie's authorship and the Georgist lesson both erased for most of a century.[1] Posner & Weyl's Radical Markets retells the story (Ch. 1) as evidence of how George's critique of property monopoly persists in popular culture.[2]
See Also
Sources
- Mary Pilon, The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015) — the standard modern account of Magie, the 1904 patent (US 748,626), and the Parker Brothers erasure (A-claims; widely corroborated). Publisher
- Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets (2018), Ch. 1 (The Landlord's Game passage, p. 43 per the wiki's book scan) — used for the retelling (A-claim). Book page