It seems that resource management requires some incentive to manage your resources well. In this game, I don't really have any obligations - it's kind of difficult for me to evaluate if I need to adjust my strategy while playing the game because I have no baseline or objectives to compare my progress to. I got pretty far in before I even realized the price of children had gone up, because I was just spam clicking, but then I just kept doing it, because I didn't really have a reason not to. Maybe some sort of failable objective, along with a reason to keep cash on hand in the event of emergency, would help economize the player's choice. You have a pretty good starting framework to implement this.
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Thanks for the feedback! I agree, I had very little time to balance everything. Both the amount of money required to hire people and the amount of money they produce need to be rebalanced. There is one fail-state in case one runs out of money but it’s pretty unlikely to happen unless one actively tries to.
This said, the game is not actually a management game, despite pretending to be. It’s meant to be a satirical take on capitalist exploitation and to show how easy it was make money off the backs of workers during the first industrial boom, without many obligations or safeguards in place.
It was a deliberate choice to not have clear objectives. As it is never explicitly stated that the ultimate goal is to make money, one could quickly assume it is, given the context of the game and the values of the world we live in. However, when finishing the game the first time a player enters a leaderboard where money made has no value at all, and instead focuses on how the workers were treated.