Well. No shit. The shit economy was caused by a military loss. +2 economy wouldn't have saved the last game, but +2 military might have.
Your macro image isn't even the correct spam to use for this. As for your edit, go ahead and actually read the game if you wanta know why they lost >.>
Bizarre edit conversation instead of just posting or something. Okay. But whatever, to elucidate on the loss in the last game, the devastated economy there was caused by loosing a war. It wasn't economic mismanagement that lost the last game (even though the technical lose condition that was triggered was running out of money) but rather being military conquered, which forced so many debts on us that we ran out of money as a consequence. So, no, the economy wasn't the big cause of the last games loss. Our economy was actually incredibly strong (thanks in part to our military conquests) but our military was apparently not strong enough, so it could in fact be said that we lost the last game in part because we chose economy above military. Or at least we were at the wrong balance between them, too heavily towards economy.
As for practical use of economy vs military, you're right that it's possible to use the economy to buff the military (although normally slowly and not really more effectively then a 1 to 1 ratio most of the time). However, the thing is the larger a military is, the more powerful and useful it is, wheras economy is more typically (not always, but... More usually.) a resource to be spent. What this means is if a case comes up where we need to spend a point of the economy a 4 is as good as a 6, the 4 goes to 3, the 6 goes to 5, either way we've overall spent a point of economy. In the case of a military use though, having a 6 instead of a 4 might mean we get a +bonus to our roll. Sure, in an economic crisis where we need to spend a whole bunch of points it's better to have higher otherwise we run the risk of running out, but generally military crisis tend to be more dangerous in the immediate term (where it's harder to utilize the points for other things like say, buying a bigger army, or selling our army to neighboring countries as mercenaries) then economic crisis. So even when thinking about crisis military is better then economy.