I strongly suspect there’s a fantastic economic lesson here. Just based on how the economy has developed, I’d bet the code for the game’s market is chock full of tacit neoliberal assumptions about economic non-interventionism being magically optimal.
I have a hypothesis what happened: the "rugged individualists” of the neoliberal right always discount the self-compounding effects of luck in determining wealth outcomes. Given a completely equal starting population, wealth gaps unavoidably emerge between those who catch lucky breaks early on and those whose luck is worse. The gaps form the basis of feedback loops, because luck buys more luck in the form of greater economic freedom to leverage opportunities, and so widen themselves unless intentionally counteracted.
In a real economy, luck cuts both ways. Some apparent opportunities are dead ends, so fortunes can reverse themselves. But the game has one ladder to climb, one set of predetermined opportunities. Reaching for the next rung on that ladder is never a financial mistake, and in fact the only real option available. The luck-driven feedback loop is the only real dynamic, and the most significant source of early lucky breaks is simply the good fortune to have gotten in on the ground floor. This seems to happen in a lot of virtual economies.
Likewise, this same tendency in real-world economies is tempered by impending humanitarian crises neoliberals assume to be inefficiencies caused by insufficient devotion to their faith, but are actually caused by their faith. The unregulated market, “slow AI” that it is, will blithely solve for a problem by killing off the economically inconvenient, an outcome we can’t tolerate politically in the real world. So we always keep a thumb on the scale in real economies, and the neoliberals blame that for preventing the emergence of their capitalist utopia. But in a game there’s no mass starvation, no grinding the economy to a halt because there aren’t enough “losers” to do the grunt work or enough “winners” to keep them employed. There’s just people who don’t have fun and quit, which will eventually be of great concern to the company that profits from people sticking around, but doesn’t seem as dire as the real world consequences.
Thus I think what we are seeing might actually be a fantastic model of laissez-faire capitalism, inadvertently stripped of most real-world confounds and so producing a much purer signal of the consequences than is otherwise available: the rungs of the ladder get further and further apart until the effort required to climb up a rung is impractical for most people.
