The part that’s weird to me is how for a game about understanding human history Civilization sure knows very little about economics and politics

that’s just cus most people know next to nothing about economics or politics when it comes from a marxist perspective, which obviously makes it so they miss out on a huge branch of socioeconomics. most normies (yeah yeah the word sucks but it fits) act like knowledge about socialism is some forbidden knowledge or some shit, as if hermaeus mora himself popped down to give it to mankind just to hurt them. so they go out of their way to never learn any slight bit of marxist understanding of the world, and obviously have huge gaps in their understanding that they fill with nonsense spackling over the holes. The elites and academics don’t fall for those traps, likely cus they have family that understand class consciousness and are scared to death of the rest of us getting it.

It might have been, now that you mention it. I probably just misremembered.

And yeah, Civilization is pretty bad about that, as with a lot of other strategy games. In terms of gameplay i suppose it makes sense though, since as a player pretty much anything that happens has to be because of your own initiative rather than historical forces. Things have to be catered and edited so that player choice comes first.