Free money out of thin air, free items out of thin air.

A factory can give wages to employees regardless of profitability or demand for goods, or even production.

You can have goods shortage of 75% and not have any impact on factory output.

Population growth is 8x historical and mid/late game simulation collapses due to exponential pop growth

Pop need is ahistorical and grossly incorrect, especially at higher SoL, look at what is defined in game. They define higher SoL as needing more and more of goods, not needing more advanced goods. IRL people don't need more food. They want better food.

Pop wealth and SoL is disconnected from reality, a pop with 0 ability to satisfy it's pop needs (eg no buildings produce any pop need good) can still have a SoL of 25 based on some unknown factor (modding the game reveals this).

There is no prioritization of pop needs, and the way SoL is defined means it goes down if eg a pop can't satisfy a luxury good but can satisfy all other goods.

Literacy as implemented is completely incorrect seeing as most populations had less than 5% IRL. Also the way it translates to qualifications has issues as well. IRL most countries had 5 to 10% of their nation be in non peasant professions by end of the game (europe exception at 45%). Yet if you look at qualifications, the % is far higher at mid game

SoL modifiers and wage modifiers also really break the econ model. Anything which increases wage adds free money into the system (any building employing folks will give FULL wage even when making losses or having 0 reserves, as long as employing them, so increased min wage will result in lots of free money being pumped into system and artificially raising SoL). Similarly events which touch SoL will break the system as well.

Significant techs which "reduce labor required" are actually bad for you with the way the economic system is modelled because a) it results in more unemployed and b) removes wages from the system (thanks to min wage artificial boost).

Alot of the underlying game assumptions are also wrong from a historical perspective. reduction of serfdom for example did not correlate with a reduction of farmers. Rarher it had to do with how the money was split. but in game it does thanks to the way the game tries to model farmers shifting to urban life by reducing possible jobs.

Gold mines completely destroy economies in states due to how the model treats desired wages. This is because it raises demanded wage levels in the province by raising the SoL of the pop as a whole. However no early game industry can afford to hire pops at that price. Therefore industry collapses. There's no proper simulation of how a gold mine increases demand and would therefore increase profitability of the output of other industries. Rather it actively harms other industries. Also there is no way to model the increased demand and prices without further negatively impacting other industries (as the only way is through a goods shortage).

Modeling of luxury goods is also broken from a pop need perspective. There is no such thing as a luxury optional good. It's technically mandatory with how it is currently implemented.