I think I spent about 2 hours trying to see if I could fail the game and it becomes exceedingly difficult after a point.
After I avoided joining Pia's group, I decided to see how long it would take me to just lose everything.
The loss of happiness is hard to reach without ending up with more coins in your coffers.
And dumping money is harder when doing so greatly increases happiness which is even harder to lose. (Especially if you added the free money from the Science dweebs)
And not to mention, I just got almost 9k people by continuously screwing them over for that long.
Otherwise, it was a fun game experience but man, I just couldn't lose even when I set out to try.