Take for instance the financial sector. They make allocation decisions in essence and sell service around management, consulting, and financial engineering. A large chunk of our economy is based around resource allocation, not actually turning resources into products more efficiently than the last guy.
As an economy progresses, it moves further and further away from things and towards ideas. We went from hunters and gatherers of food and clothing, to agriculture, to machining things, to primitive banking, all the way up to modern financing.
At each step we became further and further removed from actually putting iron-to-iron and producing this. We become more involved in how to efficiently allocate resources for those that did produce.
And that population of those that do produce continues to fall as automation comes along and we become better at making more with less. Finance has really put productive resources to amazing efficient use though capitalism.
We will get to a point where almost nobody does machines or sits on an assembly line anymore, and their jobs will give way to a larger and larger pool of people who work in the meta-market, the mental-based market that really drive the physical-based market.