Social processes tend to expand to fill all available space.

In an economy, an example is the competitive process between companies.

Inside of organizations, an example is the emergent internal political dynamics.

This expansion happens because social processes are recursive.

Each individual agent gets a little bit of edge from doing an extra level of recursion and response.

"They just did X, which means I should do Y in response."

And then later: "They just did X', which means I should now do Y' "

If the agent didn't do this extra recursion, they'd leave possible value on the table they could harvest... or maybe even get knocked out of the game.

This local individual process leads to the overall system emergently expanding until it fills all available space: the carrying cost of how much the system as a whole can get away without being ground-truthed into oblivion.

Organizations that are massively profitable and large scale can have a very high threshold of carrying cost; the internal political dynamics in those cases can expand to dwarf the actual value-creating activities.