In reality you generally don't want to have 40 years of suck to get to some long term gain, because you need to live those 40 years.
USA in 1980 was already a developed nation with a high relative standard of living. It could only grow GDP by inventing new technology and process not simply import proven tech.
China's continued failures are massive and ongoing. Some numbers look ok relative to their past failures but that's about it.
http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...
I don't think that's really true. I don't think any game company or designer cares about forcing a pet economic theory to work.
More that game economies have a purpose and can be explicitly modelled to achieve that purpose, even if that means doing unrealistic things (such as conjure up resources out of nowhere). That's not too say that they can't be an effective test model for real world scenarios, if you bear those conceits in mind.
If an economy makes players have a bad time, they can jump ship in a way that they can't do in the real world. There is a financial incentive for game designers to build an economy that makes players satisfied. Strictly modelling a game on real life economic policies is usually not a good way to achieve this. Vast resource inequality between players is a good way to kill a multiplayer game, for example - unless you even the divide in some way, only those at the very top want to keep playing.
As an adjacent example, City Skylines is a pretty fun city builder. A huge simulation, down to very complex traffic models. You can build sprawling cities with a bunch of highways.
But it's extremely hard to build anything that replicates old European cities, or denser cities like in Asia, because your smallest useful road is very big in relation to the buildings. The tools given to you basically point you directly to American-style zoning that leads to suburban sprawl and huge highway systems.
In a sense, that's the point of the game (to make you fight traffic), but it's difficult if you are trying to build a certain kind of city that we know exist and are, in fact, "better cities".
The simulation presents a certain worldview of how cities are built.
For example, mixing commercial and residential buildings - will it work or not?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-scandalous-history-of-monop...
Real world economics is infinitely more complex than the handful of rules in a game.