Residue as Byproduct: Extraction Constraints and the Durability of Political Orders

Several distinct literatures explain why extractive political orders persist: stationary bandit theory, fiscal-contract accounts, public-goods theory, resilience scholarship, selectorate theory, and the comparative-politics literature on regime durability. Each uses domain-specific assumptions. This article proposes a setup in which four stan-dard microeconomic properties — convex marginal cost of extraction, concave and bounded marginal utility of extractor return for producers, an equilibrium tendency toward zero net extraction, and an exogenous vector of distributed structural constraints — are consistent with the central patterns of all these traditions without their domain-specific additional assumptions. A graphical account shows that stress buffers, which Olson’s framework does not explain, arise as a structural byproduct of distributed constraint: the extractor limited by distributed costs stops far from the producer’s breaking point; the extractor limited only by producer resistance sits at the edge. The contribution is parsimony, not discovery.