Popular Misconceptions

Next on the list of ‘well i never’ facts that I’m looking at is a claim over the amount of Monopoly money printed:

Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.

I couldn’t find any existing research already online as to whether this or true, so have attempted some rough estimations using available figures below. On face value it does, however, seem initially plausible that Monopoly prints more money than the treasury. After all, Monopoly money is clearly worth far less than real money, whatever the currency.

There’s probably a few similar type claims you could make about toy and board game manufacturing. Lego have long claimed, for instance, to be the world’s largest producer of rubber tyres - if you count them by number - at 306 million per year (see their company profile 2006 [PDF]). I can invent a few more, which may or may not turn out to be true:

• Cluedo produces more sections of lead piping than all the plumbing firms put together
• If you added together all the sets of Risk owned by everyone in the world, it would be the world’s biggest army.
• Rubber ducks are manufactured at a faster rate than natural duck breeding.
• The world’s most mass-produced clothing line was for a Barbie doll

Clearly, the amusing and surprising element in all of these types of facts is the way that toy manufactures seem to be about to out-produce big established industries. In reality of course, its only down to the fact that the toy versions are so much smaller.

Back to the Monopoly question. The official Monopoly website has a list of fun Monopoly facts, including the following:

The total amount of money in a standard MONOPOLY® game is $15,140.

Over 250 million sets of the MONOPOLY® game have been sold worldwide.

Monopoly was first launched in 1935 (and depicting the American Atlantic City, not London, as people in the UK might assume). So if you multiply $15,140 by 250 million, divide that by the 71 years that the Monopoly game has been selling (the Monopoly fact page is dated at 2006), and we get a very rough average of $146 million worth of Monopoly money printed a day.

How about the US Treasury then? Well their currency production faq page has the following answer to the ‘How much paper currency does the Treasury Department print every day?’ question:

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) … [produce] approximately 37 million currency notes each day with a face value of about $696 million, and 45 percent of these notes are the $1 denomination. About 95 percent of the currency notes printed each year are used to replace notes that are already in circulation.

So, on these estimations, the US treasury prints almost five times more money (by face value) per day than is printed for Monopoly (which is used across the world).

Of course, the figures I’ve based this estimation on might now be wildy out, but even so, Monopoly has some catching up to do.

If you think you can do a better calculation - let me know in the comments below!

Incidentally, you can now, if you so wish, print your own Monopoly money.