Starvation should be a much more significant penalty. Out-breeding starvation to keep people happy and the economy humming should probably neither work nor be the optimal strategy.
That said, game is sufficiently fun and not horribly broken, making it much better than most games I've seen in this genre. It's funny that you can basically win at any point if you're willing to throw away 20th century industry and either are okay with the world becoming a entropy-defying cannibalistic hellscape or have an okay industrial base of any kind. It does take a long, long time, though, without those sweet resources.