I first learned about Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, a few years ago when someone forwarded me a video of her appearing on a CBS news program talking about land value tax (LVT). I couldn’t believe my eyes. Never had I seen this issue addressed on a network news program. After that, I soon noticed that she took every opportunity to raise the issue on screen and in print, including in a 2023 multi-page spread in the New York Times.
When I learned she was having a book published entitled “Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love & Work,” I eagerly signed up for an advance copy. I’m glad I did. Hers is a riveting book that is part autobiographical — tracing her road to becoming an economist from when she first read “Freakonomics,” co-authored by Steven Levitt (who became one of her academic advisers as she pursued her PhD at the University of Chicago) — and part how-to guide. Game theory in all its forms – traditional, behavioral, evolutionary – is the basis for the advice she gives, engagingly illustrated with examples from gaming, pop culture, academic studies and her life.
Not surprisingly for a housing economist, several chapters in her book are about the housing market, culminating in the final chapter that LVT fans will cherish. Fittingly, the chapter opens by declaring the rules of the economy are flawed and that the Georgist Lizzie Magie made it her mission to expose those flaws by designing what became the classic game “Monopoly.”
According to Fairweather, Magie intentionally designed the game poorly so that the player lucky enough to acquire valuable board spaces becomes uncatchable. This illustrates that the main flaw in the dominant economic system is that landowners may extract value from the economy without contributing anything in return.
Moreover, says Fairweather, if a player does not take advantage of buying a valuable space, it does not make the game fairer but only allows another player to acquire it. Because the decisions of individual players do not affect the fairness of the system, it is rules that need to be changed.
Fairweather explains how LVT corrects economic unfairness by collecting the community created value of land to pay for public goods that benefit everyone. She writes:
“Capitalism is flawed, but it has an easy fix – or, at least, the fix is easy from an economic standpoint. Tax the land and redistribute the wealth to the players in the economy who have fallen behind. That way we can all have a better chance of winning.”
When you have a better chance of winning, you’ll no longer hate the game.
Link to buy the book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo243483322.html
