Last night I played Monopoly with my new housemates out on Treasure Island, and a couple of friends of one of the housemates. It had been a long time since I had last played, and I realized this time more than I had ever realized when I was younger that the game was intended to mirror some important societal realities. When you're a kid, "monopoly" is just another odd word, not unlike "scrabble", "backgammon" and "yahtzee". Playing the game is supposed to be an innocuous family pastime, not necessarily a lens into the capitalist system.

By the end of the night, we all had to agree that as board games go, Monopoly is extraordinarily painful to play. And not just because it lasts a long time - when you start to bargain amongst each other for property and buy houses and hotels, it can speed up very quickly. It's painful because inevitably somebody will begin to come out ahead, and you can watch things progress as the game becomes more and more polarized. The rich player is able to consolidate her monopolies, and the poor players regretfully dole out ever larger sums. Players go bankrupt slowly, one by one, and when you're out first, there's nothing to do but stand by and brood. Few Monopoly games ever get completed, because the outcome seems clear and inevitable long before it becomes a reality.

Even the winner spends much of the game in a conflicted emotional state. Sure, you're winning, and you've got a lot of money and property that you can strategize with. But when your ruined competitors are also your friends sitting around the table with you, you start to get that robber-baron guilt. And pretty soon, you don't even feel like completing the game yourself.

At one point, when I was paying out the nose to land on a square where the eventual winner had built a hotel, it felt not entirely unfamiliar. I realized this was because I feel very much the same way about the prospect of paying Comcast nearly $60 per month for internet service. On Treasure Island, Comcast has a monopoly on high-speed internet. And that's a reality. By moving there, I effectively rolled the dice and landed on their square.

When I was little, Monopoly would give me fits. As much as I hated losing most games, I hated losing Monopoly the most, and I think it's because the innate cruelty of the system was so apparent. That a game can start out looking so very much like perfect competition and end so very inequitably really got my goat.

You have to sometimes wonder if the widening of the American gap is a signal that one giant Monopoly game is progressing towards its end.

It wasn't initially a hard decision: I had been tapping my parents and extended family for cash over twenty-three years of being alive on this planet, and this had included a generous amount of travel and an expensive undergraduate education. It wasn't hard, because as formative as all this had been, these people clearly did not deserve to be footing my bills any longer - perhaps they never deserved to be doing so in the first place, with their middle-class teacher incomes - so I resolved to finally make my own living. Not a radical or unusual choice, by any means. But by doing this, I signed myself up for a sort of crash course in economics that I am still trying to get my head around.

Because all of a sudden, I'm a stipended intern at a non-profit, and I'm poor. My estimation of my personal needs has always tended toward modesty, but now even my modest needs sometimes seem like more than my budget can handle. Worst of all, I'm stuck with principles from those bygone days that predispose me toward financial strain: I require myself to be decent, generous and far-sighted. Terrible, isn't it? I love the work at Net Impact, where I get to learn about business and possibilities for social progress all at once, and I see it as a step in the right direction. But with principles such as these, for the time being I wince at every expenditure large and small, and fret over the impending necessity of dental work. Dental work! If I lived in Europe (and I'm certainly not the first American to express wanting to do so), my teeth would be a matter of public concern.

Never before has being an American seemed like such a hardship. I suppose I've always known there was a disparity between America and other developed countries, but now this knowledge rings a little more personal. I read a pair of articles in this month's Common Ground Magazine (a San Francisco publication which, fortunately for me, can be picked up for free), both of which emphasized what I already knew: that of developed countries, America has the largest and most insurmountable income gap, and job growth, where it occurs, occurs almost exclusively in the highest and lowest income brackets. Jobs paying $25k/year or less are growing, as are those paying $100k/year or more. What we're seeing fewer of are jobs in between.

Increasingly, it seems most Americans are left with no comfortable choices. When you have to choose between being very rich and being very poor, undoubtedly more and more people will be tempted to recklessly pursue the former regardless of what it might cost them in integrity. When you raise the stakes this way for an entire national population, it should be no surprise when the corporate sector finds itself in a state of moral bankruptcy. The happy medium is conspicuously missing, so the choices we make will be motivated more by a fear of poverty than by a desire to behave consciously and appropriately.

Corporate social responsibility has been high on my radar lately, but I'm conflicted about whether this trend is doing everything it ought to. It seems everybody is for it, but what we understand from it seems to vary by individual. If the environment scores a few initial points because companies find new ways to make being green profitable, great, but we still haven't addressed how the employees of these corporations are going to avoid a nasty fall to poverty if they become sanguine enough to suggest a change that isn't profitable. An Economist article forwarded by one of my colleagues a few days ago brings up Robert Reich, a new critic of CSR, and while I'm not entirely sure what to think about his conclusions, much of what Reich says rings true, pessimistic as it is.

I will continue to explore these issues as I learn more about them, and hope to become a better blogger as I learn more about blogging. Stay tuned.