Economic Simulations - Why I Love them so Much

Monopoly and Broker
I guess my love affair with economic simulation...

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Can't say I really play, or have played, economic simulation games. The closest I ever would have got would probably be simple market supply/demand models in Power Grid and Silverton, with the latter being slightly above simple and made fun with the automated spreadsheet a fan created for it (Silverton is a fun fave with railroad building, a bit of mining, shipping ore, and selling to the market).

There is a game that I found here in Indonesia called Stockastic, which is a fun little stock market game. You can check the forecast of companies and affect the performance of those companies in small ways. "Buy low and sell high" is a simple principle, but it is difficult to actually manage.

One of my favorite investing games, though, is Imperial. Investing in countries while manipulating the wars they fight allows for conflict on multiple levels. Fighting for control over a country to try to avoid your investment in another country from crumbling under the weight of its armies is a tense struggle. Being able to invest in a country far from your primary holdings because the current controller of that country seems to be running it well is also fun. Having players control the "businesses" directly in competition with each other, while being able to invest in any, makes the game more interactive than other economic games I have played.

I do take exception to your statement: "Of course, as a grown-up, I know that capitalism has done very little good and mostly just created a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Capitalism is simply the freedom of people to do what they like with their time, skills, and resources. Like any economic system, people will manipulate things to their own advantage. However, the story of the past 200 years is that people being free to make their own decisions leads to more wealth for everyone. This is why I, a simple high school teacher, can send this message to you instantly and essentially for free across the world on a device more powerful than governments had 50 years ago. Here is a simple article with a number of sources, but others are readily available on the internet, as well as videos by Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, among others ( blog.bham.ac.uk/cityredi/capitalism-and-...al-living-standards/ ).