'Monopoly money' is going away, but that's not the real scandal, says the woman who wrote the book on Monopoly

Click here to buy Mary's book.

There was much hand-wringing recently when Hasbro announced that it would make the popular board game Monopoly cashless. Now, players will use something more like credit cards.

"My kids won't learn math," yelled parents everywhere, in perhaps the biggest indictment ever of the way Americans learn math. In case you missed it, when I wrote Stop Getting Ripped Off, I blamed lots of America's ills, including the housing bubble, on America's mathematical illiteracy, also known as Innumercy. To wit: In tests, about half of U.S. adults are incapable of splitting a lunch bill and adding in tax and tip. And you know this, because there's nearly always a brawl when a bill comes to a table of friends for lunch.

In other words, there is little evidence that Monopoly, the game, was doing a bang-up job of teaching kids how to handle money. (It does do a pretty good job of preparing people for the upcoming Donald Trump administration, complete with a deep understanding of how New Jersey politics and Atlantic City real estate really works. Not to mention turning family member against family member through greed.)

But to make sure I wasn't missing something, I consulted the woman who literally wrote the book on Monopoly. Mary Pilon, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, wrote an amazing tome about the game's rebellious history and how, in a parody of itself that fits neatly in today's political atmosphere, its lesson about robber barons was co-opted by corporate America ugliness, cheating a deserving little person out of big money along the way. I highly recommend it, and lucky you, the less-expensive paperback was just released. Buy it here.

Anyway...Mary says the end of Monopoly money (wait, what the Hell will that expression mean to millennials now?) just continues a long history of the game's evolution. And if people really want to complain about the death of the Monopoly's use as a teaching tool, they should insist the game add more real-world elements, like Big Short style mortgage-backed securities. Here's Mary's take.

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By Mary Pilon

This month, Hasbro, the makers of the board game Monopoly, unveiled a new incarnation of the storied game, Monopoly Ultimate Banking. Instead of paying in cash, players will use plastic. Chance cards will automatically roll funds into player accounts, thus diminishing the role of banker. And “Life Event” Chance cards will allow for some fluctuation of property values on the board.

Mary Pilon

It turns out that if you’re the author of a book about Monopoly (mine, “The Monopolists” came out last year in hardcover, and a couple of weeks ago in paperback), you will find yourself inundated with inquiries about the changes to the game. In the modest board game beat, this is about as close to a presidential election as it gets, and, like a presidential election, it’s a cycle of change that becomes expected. Previously, I had written about another similar twist for the New York Times in 2013 and a 2014 appeal to change the game’s rules in order to appeal to a new generation of players.

So this month’s news had echoes of the same; at worst, the new game is a flimsy marketing ploy, at best it's a hilarious twist in the game's ever-continuing evolution.

Hasbro, who acquired the Monopoly brand in 1991, has tried to reboot the old brand many times and will likely keep doing so in the name of keeping consumers purchasing the little green houses and red hotels. In addition to the plethora of themed -opoly games on store shelves, the game lives in on various digital versions, including on iPhones, iPads and Xbox.

We erroneously think of Monopoly as a fixed game because the version most of us played as kids is similar to what our parents or grandparents played before. However, the 1935 version that Parker Brothers sold is the product of 30 years of evolution, starting from Lizzie Magie's 1903 Landlord's Game to the version that Darrow controversially sold during the Great Depression. That’s part of why that version is good -- it was effectively product tested for decades.

Purists may decry the changes to the game, but the irony is that by changing the game, Hasbro is doing precisely what the early folk game players did with it from 1904 onward. Back then, players localized the game to weave in properties from their neighborhoods, modified the rules to make it simpler and modified the game to make it reflect their own times.

Over the last year, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from a variety of Monopoly fans, including many parents who use the game to teach their children about money. While one could argue with the deeper values the game espouses (in real life there can be more than one property owner in the end), one parent made the point that since she, like most Americans, relies on debit and credit cards for daily purchases, she struggled to explain budgeting to her child. To a kid, it’s all plastic, but with the cash in a Monopoly game, values could be more easily distinguished. The diminished role of cash may be more close to our current experience as consumers, but it may cheat younger players of a more tactile learning experience about spending.

Another reader joked with me about adding securitization to the game. Why not have mortgage-backed securities on Park Place? Bundle up and do some swaps on the orange properties? Leverage the stash of cash in the bank a bit?

If it was relevance that Hasbro was looking for in this latest flavor of the game, if anything, they may have undershot the mark.

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