Political Economy: Foundations I

🌱 Meetup: The Triple Integration Challenge — Political Economy Through a Georgist Catan Lens

Political economy has long struggled with a central puzzle: how to integrate economic efficiency, individual liberty, and social justice without treating them as competing goals.
Most courses teach these values as trade‑offs. This meetup takes a radically different approach—one that is hands‑on, playful, and structurally revealing.

We use a Georgist‑repurposed version of Settlers of Catan as affirming the core teaching tool of the notrs. The game becomes a living model of political‑economic design, where participants experiment with rules, incentives, and institutional choices to discover how all three values can reinforce one another.

🎯 What This Meetup Offers
This is an immersive participatory action‑learning session, not a lecture. You will:

• Explore how standard Catan encodes land monopoly, scarcity, and zero‑sum dynamics
• Play with a Georgist‑inspired ruleset where land rents flow to the commons
• Observe how strategic behaviour shifts when speculation no longer dominates
• Map how different rule structures affect efficiency, freedom, and fairness
• Work in groups to prototype institutional tweaks and test them in real time

🧩 The Core Design Challenge
Participants will take on a simple but profound brief:

> Examine a political‑economic system—tested through gameplay—where:
> - productive activity is rewarded (efficiency)
> - players retain meaningful strategic freedom (liberty)
> - community‑created value is distributed fairly (justice)

Instead of sacrificing one value to protect another, we explore how aligned incentives can make all three mutually reinforcing.

🎲 Why Catan?
Because games are micro‑economies analogies.
Catan makes visible what textbooks hide:

• how land values emerge
• how monopolies distort behaviour
• how public revenue can stabilise cooperation
• how rule changes reshape incentives instantly

By repurposing the game with Georgist principles, we turn it into a sandbox for institutional imagination.

🧠 How We Learn
The session blends:

• Interactive gameplay using the modified ruleset
• Design labs where groups adjust rules and test outcomes
• Reflective dialogue on what each rule change reveals
• Connections to real‑world policy in housing, taxation, public goods, and governance

🌍 Who This Is For

• People curious about political economy, Georgism, or institutional design
• Educators seeking participatory teaching tools
• Strategy gamers who enjoy variants with deeper meaning
• Policy thinkers, activists, and community organisers
• Anyone who wants to explore how societies can be both free and fair.