True. But the tradition ensured that leaders were accumulating social wealth, not resource wealth. The fascinating thing was that the participants were producing surplus solely to re-distribute it.

This is fundamentally different from our model where surplus is converted to markers and then hoarded. Well... "invested" is the polite word.

You'd think that in a steady state economy there would be no such thing as surplus.

Plenty of surplus if one has far less people than what the local biosphere can provide.