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The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree. This has documented by other economists / historians as "bullshit jobs" / "useless jobs". People sending emails all day or influencers obviously depend on mineral extraction to exist, but the direct inputs to their wealth creation are not minerals. You can "implement ideas" with a relatively small footprint.

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> The point is that society has decoupled wealth creation from mineral extraction to a large degree.

Have we really though, or is the coupling just obscured to the point of near invisibility?

Take software development. In a bounded context, a solo developer’s continued output of software looks quite clearly decoupled from material inputs. They may work essentially indefinitely, producing new wealth, powered only by renewable energy.

Step out of the bubble of the thought experiment, though, to look at the software development industry more broadly, and what do we see? A vast churn of new computing equipment in pockets, offices, unseen data centers, and embedded at every possible scale in between, with layer upon layer of software abstraction that chews up most of the increases in computing power anyhow.

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