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Though on the surface the valley's prosperity appears stable, the forces generated by over-reach are gathering beneath the surface--the stick/slip hypothesis in action. The governing elite has over-reached, burdening the productive class with high taxes to support temple/fort building, lavish palaces, conquests of surrounding valleys, and similar projects of over-reach.

At the same time, the soil in the valley floor is becoming exhausted by over-exploitation, and the higher-elevation marginal lands are slipping into net liabilities as agricultural over-reach reaps what has been sown.

As fewer farmers generates large surpluses, the productive populace slips into widening inequality: more households slip into subsistence poverty while a handful of the elite class increase their wealth and power at the expense of the remaining productive farmers.

The easy lumber, wood, soil and water have all been exploited, and as the costs rise the marginal resources have also been depleted.

In the positive feedback of over-reach, the elite class has grown in size, reach and complexity; as inequality rises, whatever marginal negative feedback loops existed in prosperity (craft and trade associations, etc.) fade along with prosperity. The elite's diversion of the valley's surplus (income) runs into the physical obstacle of declining surplus.

In response, the elites raise taxes on the declining class of productive farmers and begins poaching off the weaker elements of the elite class: what I term Internecine Conflict Between Protected Fiefdoms. If neighboring regimes or trading blocs have surplus capital stored (as money, grain, fuel, etc.) then the valley's elite borrows this capital to fund the shortfall between its expenses and income or attempts to appropriate the surplus via military conquest.

The valley also attempts to offset its depletion of local resources by extending its supply routes to ever-more distant sources of wood, grain, metals, water, etc.

As windfall exploitation returned ever-more marginal returns on capital and labor invested, perturbations begin cropping up: incursions from neighboring valleys increase, harvests fall, religious cults arise, drawdown of stored reserves is not replaced, some religious/cultural rituals are abandoned, etc.

This devolution follows the Pareto Principle: negative changes in as little as 4% of the market/populace wield outsized effects on 64% of the group. Once 20% are affected, then that "vital few" influence the remaining 80% of the "trivial many."

Devolution marked by occasional small crises fits the power law model: frequent events are modest in size while infrequent events are much larger and more significant.

If we were to plot out the increasingly marginal returns, the rising borrowing and interest payments, the higher costs of maintaining the elites, the capital buildings, military defense, etc., we would discern Self-Organized Criticalities (SOC).

In physical phenomena, a critical point is the threshold at which a system radically changes its behavior or structure--for example, when H2O (water) melts from solid to liquid. In standard systems, a parameter controls the rate of change. In the case of ice melting, the parameter is temperature.

Self-organized criticalities, in contrast (recall our previous example of the sand pile), reach a critical state via the action of their intrinsic dynamics. Adjusting the rate of sand falling on the pile does not change the fact that sand avalanches will occur along a power law chart (small frequent sand slides interrupted at longer intervals by large sand slides).

In our valley example, depleting the remaining wood and soil at slightly faster or slower rates (changing the parameters of depletion) will not change the eventual "landslide": the valley can no longer feed or sustain itself, despite the borrowing, conquests, longer supply chains, etc. which were instituted to overcome local depletion.

Lastly, we note that the depletion/over-reach/devolution is scale-invariant; the small plot of land offers up