The last 2 statements are so far from reality it's insane. I live in the south/the midwest (depending on who you ask) in an okay-sized city, I was a SWE making $85k/year gross and struggling to cover housing and bills, and I got laid off when the company "eliminated my position".
85k should definitely cover your expenses. You can rent out a bedroom instead of a house. Buy a cheap car. Eat canned beans. Even in SF, it’s doable on 85k.
> Most people didn’t go to college to eat canned beans. We went to college so we could stop eating canned beans.
Dreaming of something does not make it real.
Even in Germany, where going to university is very cheap, people have such dreams of social ascent by getting a degree. Here is a German article about how this does not always go well:
It was real here in the US for a great deal of time, and its decline of 'realness' seemingly coincided with the universal push for youth to attend it. The culture of college in the US i'm sure is quite different than germany or asian countries.
Talk about rent, how about an "adjacent" financial game incorporating this trend?
The "Rat-Race" playdata could be aggregated into a static (or not) database after a representative point has been reached, more or less like a present-day snapshot even if it is not expected to stand the test of time for very many years. How could it anyway? But it could be good for now. People don't play games forever either.
Now there is already a built-in predictive element to this data since players are optimizing for early retirement.
Then use that as your gameboard, kind of like in the appropriately named Monopoly[0] game. Now in parallel to the truly aspirational predictive element, you run an "economy" against it which is naturally more of a moving target.
So on that not-so-imaginary playing field, you the hypervisory player compete with other "policymakers" to see who can extract the most upcoming wealth from the FAANGsters before a fixed deadline or something.
The objective is to end up with as few as possible of the high-earners having much more to show for it compared to middle-class wage workers :\
Measured by how much your policies contributed to the greatest amount of predicted early retirement dates turning out to be as unrealistic as possible. Perhaps in dollars. Or maybe dollars/rat-race-player.
Without crashing the economy beyond the point where policy has no more leverage :0
[0] And Monopoly led to "Acquire", the 3M board game.
Acquire was not focusing on the rent-seeking itself but built on the "gameboard" assumption that the well-established underlying rent-seeking of those properties was as universal as ever.
Monopoly of course concentrating on the real estate aspect, seeking greater rents by building and/or making real estate deals for all of the homes and hotels in one market as possible. All but one winner goes bankrupt every time, that's why they call it Monopoly. Note a very fortunate player can sometimes bankrupt everyone else before building any hotels at all, in this case the game is over and nothing upscale ever arrives.
OTOH Acquire is shareholder-focused where the hotels are in chains and the trading action and cash comes from shares not real estate. Chains are built and merged on the board with inevitability, there is still a strong tendency toward a final monopoly when fully built out, but often a duopoly or even triopoly is where the market ends up. There is a higher strategy/luck ratio, and one of the most "rewarding" things is that no matter how things end up, everybody makes money and nobody goes bankrupt. Imagine that, but do consider where would all that money come from in the real world?
Monopoly is more of pure rent-seeking, these are of course hotels, but both games play exactly the same with the hotel feature completely abstracted away into any kind of such derivative behavior.
