[Question] What does the economy do?

This may sound like a question that is very big and impossible to properly answer in a LessWrong comment. And I think that’s true. But still it seems like an important question to learn about, for many different purposes (I was thinking about this in the context of AI, but I assume it is also useful for other contexts, e.g. politics or entrepreneurship).

Abstractly the answer is something like “provide goods and services for people”. But what concretely does this involve?

For instance one type of good that is provided is food, and a core piece of the manufactoring chain for food is farming. This is in principle like in children’s stories. With farming, you have to put seeds (and fertilizer etc.) into soil, wait for a while (sometimes watering it, especially if you live in a dry region) for it to grow into edible plants, and then take those plants out of the soil again.

But of course people don’t manually do this anymore, but instead use machines. And I’ve been told that they don’t even manually drive the machines, but that they are instead automatically run. So I guess farming work really involves setting up and maintaining the machines? Which presumably involves all sorts of tasks related to the problems that can arise in the farming machines, which I don’t know much about. So for example one valid answer to this question would be a description of some mechanical problems that can happen with farming machines and how those mechanical problems get fixed. Other valid answers for this part of the economy would include things about how the machines get produced, and how farmers sell the food they produce.

Speaking of selling, a huge part of the economy is coordination work. Sales, lawyers, managers, etc.. But even “coordination work” is fairly abstract. What exact tasks might it involve?

So yeah, I would be curious how much knowledge of what the economy is doing that we can collect.