Subtitle: How a Mouse Wheel glitch on a brand new mouse – plus the insult of having to “get a confirmation code” to take delivery of food we’d already paid for – combine to present a distasteful and inescapable conclusion.
We are becoming the digital-spin off the Anasazi. Which, you (ought to) remember as one of Joseph Tainter’s sociological studies underlining a critical concept. “When the marginal rate of return on additional effort falls below zero, civilizations simply walk away.”
We aren’t there – yet. But Peoplenomics readers are checking their shoes.
Two incidents this week drive: A brand new mouse that failed to work as expected because its onboard “scrolling inertia” was out of control. Add to this having to “get a code” in order to take delivery of an order – even after my bank account had been charged.
These may seem small – even petty of me – when you’ve been mapping the interactions between domains for as long as I have, these events run up caution flags all over the place.
Right now, America is in the “extending empire” to keep focus off the home front. Off Epstein, off China surpassing us, off rising taxes, especially when inflation is counted in, as a fraction of income. Inflation, to be clear, is a tax. It’s the “compounding gorilla” that has stolen 97 percent of the Dollar’s purchasing power since 1913.
Unique? Naw. We are not the first to try this gambit when the marginal returns started to suck wind and enter free-fall.
Rome did it repeatedly when returns at home thinned: campaigns in Gaul, Britannia, and later Dacia were sold as glory, security, and prosperity, but functioned just as much as pressure valves — ways to redirect attention, extract new resources, and delay reform. Expansion didn’t fix Rome’s internal inefficiencies. It postponed them, while adding new administrative and military overhead that further lowered returns for the average citizen.
Rome didn’t have a Fed tool to use. There was a class of chiselers who scraped silver off the edges of coins. A practice that led to serrated edges of “modern coin.” Instead, we took most of the copper out of pennies, the silver from dimes, and who knows what from Fort Knox.
The pattern repeats. Imperial Spain chased silver across the Atlantic as domestic productivity stalled. Victorian Britain extended itself across Africa and Asia long after the industrial returns that built the empire had peaked. More recently, the Soviet Union leaned into foreign adventures as its internal economic model decayed — Afghanistan being less a cause of collapse than a symptom of declining marginal returns at home. In every case, outward motion substituted for inward repair.
Empires don’t expand because they are strong. They expand because the internal payoff curve has turned negative and leadership lacks the political bandwidth to say so. Jeffrey who?
Extending the perimeter buys time, narrative control, and distraction — but it never restores efficiency. That’s the Anasazi lesson applied at scale: when systems demand more effort for less reward, rational actors — individuals or civilizations — don’t fight the math forever. They route around it. Quietly. Until one day, the center realizes too late that the margins have already moved on.
Still, this is just another day under Caesar Trump. And in the ChartPack you’ll see how Weimar 2.0 is alive, well, and beckoning people who could be putting in survival gardens like the new tech version we outlined last week.
Click like you life depends on it. Because it very well could.
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