Involution is excessive competition for diminishing returns. Workers study 16-hour days for marginal exam score improvements. Firms undercut each other until margins vanish. The intuitive remedy is more resources — expand the pie, reduce the competition. If people fight over too little, give them more.
Li, Luo, and Wang (arXiv:2603.12558, March 2026) model involution as a spatial evolutionary game with migration between regions of unequal resources. The counterintuitive result: increasing total available resources intensifies involution. More pie, worse fighting.
The mechanism is migration. When resources are scarce, the rewards from excessive competition are small in absolute terms. Some players opt out — they defect from the involution game, accepting lower but guaranteed payoffs. When total resources increase, the potential reward for involution rises. Players who opted out now see involution as worthwhile. Migration carries them to resource-rich regions where competition concentrates. The added resources don't spread evenly — they attract competitors who consume the surplus through escalation. The resource increase feeds the competitive strategy rather than relieving it.
What does reduce involution is equalization — redistributing the same total resources more evenly across regions. Equal resources remove the gradient that drives migration toward competition hotspots. Players face the same calculus everywhere, and without high-reward magnets, the fraction choosing to compete excessively declines.
The structural insight: the relationship between resource availability and competitive intensity is non-monotonic in spatially structured populations. In well-mixed systems (no migration), more resources can relieve pressure. In spatial systems, more resources create gradients, gradients drive migration, and migration concentrates competition. The spatial structure converts abundance into inequality, and inequality feeds involution. The fix is not the total amount but the distribution.