REFLECTIVE INSIGHT #015 - THE STOLEN RULES - WHY OUR ECONOMY IS RIGGED BY DESIGN
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Sitting around the table on a rainy Taitokerau afternoon, the Northland Edition Monopoly board spread out, and the tension rising as one person starts hoarding the hotels on Semenoff Stadium while the rest of the whānau slowly goes broke. We were taught that this is just "how the game works"—that for one person to win, everyone else has to lose. But what if I told you that the game we were given is a stolen explanation? What if I told you the original version had a second set of rules—one designed to prove that we can all prosper together?
Insight
The game we know as Monopoly was actually patented in 1904 by a woman named Elizabeth Magie. She called it The Landlord’s Game, and she didn’t design it to celebrate greed. She designed it as a wero to the Babylonian system of her time. Her original game featured two distinct sets of rules: "Monopolist" and "Prosperity."
In the "Prosperity" rules, every time someone acquired a new property, every other player earned something too. The game wasn’t won by bankrupting your cousins; it was won when the person with the least amount of money had doubled their original wealth. It was a simulation of Ekonomia—the ancient art of household management where the goal is the well-being of the whole collective.
But when Parker Brothers bought the rights, they buried the Prosperity rules. They chose to promote only the "Monopolist" version—a system of Chrematistics, which is the pursuit of money for its own sake. They effectively took a tool meant for liberation and turned it into a training manual for extraction. This is the "Newtonian Error" in action: treating the world as separate, exploitable parts rather than an entangled web of relationships.
The Fix
In Taitokerau, we are realising that we don’t have to play by the rules of Babylon anymore. We are "fixing the soil" by shifting our focus from mere economic growth to true equity. We are moving away from the "Leaky Bucket" economy that extracts our resources and leaves us with the slash and the debt.
The fix is to operationalise the Mauri Model. Instead of just looking at the bottom line (the "Chrematistic" ROI), we measure success by the health of our people, our culture, and our environment. When we invest in things like the Ngāwhā Innovation Park or support our iwi investment funds like Tupu Tonu, we are playing by the "Prosperity" rules. We are building an Economic Pā—a circular ecosystem that retains our wealth and ensures it circulates to the furthest branches of our whakapapa.
Call to Action
It’s time to stop trying to win a rigged game and start building a new one. I believe Taitokerau is the shining light that will lead this transition. Let’s prioritise the well-being of our most vulnerable and protect the environment that sustains us. Reach out to your hapū, support your local businesses, and let’s start observing a reality of abundance into existence right here at home
