Layer 0 measured the core resources pulled from the planet: energy, agriculture, livestock, forestry, construction materials and minerals.
Raw resources pass through the factory and spread into goods and services; services eventually detach from matter entirely.
But raw resources aren't used in the form they reach the end user. Oil goes to a refinery, wheat to a mill, ore to a factory; then production, processing, storage, transport, distribution, retail - and the services that make all of it possible. Layer 1 measures that whole transformation.
The 85 billion tonnes of raw material Layer 0 measures in a year, once processed, hauled and sold, becomes an economy of $118 trillion.
74% of that economy is no longer tied to any physical good - doctors, teachers, software engineers, bankers. And that share has risen throughout history: a thousand years ago 15%, a century ago 30%, today 74%.
The physical base stays roughly the same while the economy moves far beyond it.
World GDP (2025)
118,18 T $
The monetary scale the mass L0 extracts reaches once processed and hauled, the flow L2 and L3 are built on
Goods GDP
30,49 T $
Tangible output: agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, energy
Services GDP
87,69 T $
Arranging, moving, intermediating, software, the layer that rises on the physical base
Services share
74%
A rounding error 60 years ago; most of the economy today
In the figures above the tax bridge is distributed pro-rata into goods and services; the mechanism diagram below shows the tax as a separate line.
Mechanism: Where Value Flows From and To
The value added of the 30 "transitional" sectors - manufacturing, trade, transport, construction, electricity, and the like - isn't tracked anywhere on its own; it's fully redistributed to the resource and service sectors using an absorbing Markov chain method, based on actual purchasing shares. Every box is the exact sum of the arrows flowing into it; no dollar is lost or double-counted.
Note: the 6,49 T $ figure in the "Resources" box is Layer 0's extraction-cost-based measurement. The whole diagram is on the Markov-trace basis. This diagram shows the tax bridge as a separate line; the figures above distribute that tax pro-rata into goods and services, so the diagram boxes and those figures differ by exactly that redistribution.
Value is abstract, the base is physical. Services and the digital economy produce most of the output, yet the moment the heavy industry and shipping that carry them stop, the digital civilization stops within days.
Critical rate asymmetry
The raw-material value underlying a year's output ($118 trillion) changes hands in the markets in about 6 hours. Production is bound by biological and physical limits; the layer of numbers above it is not.
Whose labour sits in which layer
0Extraction955 M · %27,1
1Economy2,5 bn · %70,6
2Wealth79 M · %2,3
3Markets5 M · %0,1
Layer 3 markets turn over about 82× world GDP in a year; the core workforce that runs them is roughly 1/191 the size of Layer 0's.
What's in this layer
Pages that read the layer where material turns into value.
