While awaiting the arrival of The Limits to Growth (a 2004, 30th year update version I found on World of Books ), I’ve been looking around the web for articles and snippets on Donella Meadows. Sadly, there aren’t nearly enough considering how smart and prophetic she seemed.

To increase what’s out there, with her name attributed, I wanted to highlight a small portion of her talk on Sustainable Systems, given at the University of Michigan’s Sustainability Lecture Series on 18 March, 1999(1).

A few days short of 26 years ago, everything she says could easily be said today. And for many, it might even still seem uniquely astute, as opposed to painfully obvious and representative of one of the most maddening systemic issues (skim to the bold bit if it looks too long).

The systems principle of success to the successful. The more property you get in that game [Monopoly] the more you have the power to extract money from other people to get more property.

That’s another positive feedback loop. The richer you get in that game the richer you get. And the poorer you get, if you’re the one who doesn’t manage to get those monopolies and build those hotels, the poorer you get, until you somebody goes bankrupt or people kick the board over, because in fact it’s a very boring game.

The only good part about that game is that you get to start over. And everybody gets to be equal again. And maybe next time you get to be the successful one, who gets the positive side of this success to the successful loop, instead of the negative side.

The world is full of success to the successful loops. They are the main reason why we continue to have poverty and inequity. It’s not because of the character, either of the rich people, or of the poor people, and I don’t want to blame either one. It’s because there are a hundred, a thousand mechanisms by which if you are rich you get the capacity to get more rich. If you are powerful you get the capacity to be more powerful. And if you are neither you lose any capacity to turn yourself around.

I can list a few you can list more and if you start going around the world looking for them you just see how uncanny it is that we build systems that continually take the successful and hand them the capacity to be more successful and we take the unsuccessful and take away even that capacity that we have.

Differential education is one of the most obvious ones. The payment of interest is one. Interest always flows from those that don’t have enough money to those have more than enough money. Campaign contributions in supposed democracies. Or uneven healthcare. Racisim of all kinds. I could go on and on. You know it as well as I do. And if you don’t know it, I’d ask a poor person therefore; they’re very very aware of all the ways in which their capacity to solve their own problems is stripped from them and the capacity of the powerful to get their problems is handed to them in greater and greater quantities.

It’s a positive loop. It evolves in almost every social system, this success to the successful business is full of it.

Donella Meadows, 18 March, 1999.

Link to this quoted section. And here’s a link to part 1 of 4 of this series. How great of YouTube user Jennifer Lynn for sharing these.

Continuing the theme of great women, it’s worth remembering (or learning, if you don’t know the sad and painfully ironic story), that the inventor of Monopoly (the Landlord’s Game as she called it) was Lizzy Magie, and she “…actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time—people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.”

She created two sets of rules for her game: an anti-monopolist set in which all were rewarded when wealth was created, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and dominate opponents. Her dualistic approach was a teaching tool meant to demonstrate that the first set of rules was morally superior.

“It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a 1902 issue of the Single Tax Review. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seems[s] to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

I first learnt about this story via The Landlords Game episode of 99% Invisible.

And I thought a lot about it again in 2020, seeing Kimberly Jones explain ‘the systems principle of success to the successful’ even more succinctly.

And again in 2021, with the release of a ‘Socially conscious Monopoly game”, Blacks & Whites.

This topic and that game always nudge an old desire of mine (as I’ve mentioned before) to create a ‘White Privilege Expansion Pack’ for Monopoly, as while I love the idea of a standalone board game, I see it being missed, and too easily ignored by the people that could do with learning from it the most.

As my (white male) kids approach their teens, and they tell me of their discomfort with the increasing presence of racism and sexism in social groups adjacent to theirs, I think more than ever that it’s time to be more active in my own anti-racism and active ally behaviours.

Worth at this point and in closing, when raising the ‘privilege’ card – which seems to trigger so many privileged people – to re-share the idea of the Game of Life’s Lowest Difficulty Setting…

In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

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(1) According to this piece about the same lecture and collection of YouTube videos.