10. Final Thoughts

No economy in the world is perfect. Some have high levels of poverty and struggle to achieve economic growth. Others already have high income levels, but economic benefits are distributed unequally within the population. These differences are driven by many factors, including history, culture, the natural environment, and the nature of political and economic institutions.

By playing Hegemony you can learn how the economy works, how difficult it is for households and firms to make decisions when faced with an uncertain future, and how challenging it is for the government to balance the competing objectives of different segments of society. Should healthcare and education be free for all citizens, or should they be supplied by the free market? Should the government give free reign to capital enterprise, or should it focus its limited resources on ensuring prosperity for the working and middle classes? You and the other players will need to consider the trade-offs involved in those decisions – as well as think about your rational self-interest and the common good – as you try to win the game while building a prosperous economy.

I would go one step further and say that the willingness to challenge professional economists – and other experts – should be the foundation of democracy. When you think about it, if all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having a democracy at all? Unless we want our societies to be run by a body of self-elected experts, we all have to learn economics and challenge professional economists.

Ha-Joon Chang