Life expectancy at 90: dire implications! (SC3)

Contributor/author(s): Bernard Ng

It seems no matter how many hospitals you build, how many expensive ordinances you enact, or how much you reduce pollution, your Sim's life expectancy is never reported to be above 89, even if the city is very mature. For a while I was very annoyed at that prospect. However, after some careful thinking, the glass ceiling on life expectancy is actually a good thing.

This is because this glass ceiling is an in-built mechanism to prevent large, mature cities from plunging into great depressions over and over again. No doubt the programmers at Maxis thought about this when they designing the game:

By definition, SimCity defines the work force as the age between 22 and 67 (which is actually a lot smaller then most industrial nations; for example, Australia defines it as being 15 to 65 for males and 15 to 55 for females) A bit of quick subtraction would show that sims are expected to work for 45 years of their lives.

45 is incidentally also half of 90 ? something very significant. Why?

Because assuming your city is mature and the growth rate becomes zero, (so the death rate and the birthrate cancel each other) and there is about the same amount of sims in each age bracket (shown as the green pillars on the population graph), there would be exactly half of your sims in the work force when the LE is 90. That is disaster! Why? Because, by definition, when there are 50% of your sims in the work force (or below) a great depression strikes! In other words, if someone ever attains an LE of 90 the city would become virtually unmanageable as it continually empties out with no prospect of recovery, unless the mayor does something drastic, like abolishing health care.

Thus, it is better to settle for a life expectancy of 89, because any more and the future of your city might not be as bright as you would hope!

See also
The Great Depression
The Great Depression - result of aging population?
Preventing depressions