The Big Picture
Horizontal Cross-Section
The four layers side by side, across six dimensions
The layers are a vertical stack: 85.06 Gt of raw material extracted, 118.18 T$ of annual value added, 734.39 T$ of net wealth, 9,735 T$ of annual market flow. This dataset cuts across them: how many people's labour each layer holds, how much land surface and energy, on what time scale it renews, which shock it is fragile to, and its legal and physical anchor. The workforce and latency rows reuse existing sourced datasets; the land and energy rows are compiled from primary sources.
85.06 Gt of raw material extracted per year
118.18 T$ of annual value added (GDP)
734.39 T$ of net wealth stock
9,735 T$ of annual market flow, 82 times world GDP
Workforce
million people (and share of global employment)
How many people's core labour sits in each layer, and what share of the global labour force that is. The layer split partitions employment: L0 extraction, L1 the rest of the economy (industry and all services), L2 finance and real estate, L3 the core market roles (carved out of L2).
955 million people, 27.1% of global employment (ISIC A agriculture, forestry, fishing + ISIC B mining and quarrying).
2,486 million people, 70.6% of global employment: industry (manufacturing, construction, utilities) and all services (trade, transport, health, education, public administration, accommodation, professional and administrative, arts). Extraction and finance and real estate excluded.
79 million people, 2.3%: financial and insurance activities (ISIC K) + real estate (ISIC L).
5 million people, 0.14%: securities and commodities dealing, exchanges, clearing and settlement, asset and fund management.
Land footprint
million km²
The terrestrial surface each layer permanently occupies. Reference: ice-free land 130 million km².
48.1 million km²: cropland 16.0 + meadows and pasture 32.0 + mining 0.1. 37% of ice-free land.
0.032 million km²: global non-residential built-up surface (building footprint, 2020). Factories, warehouses, workshops, ports and part of commercial/institutional buildings.
0.80 million km²: artificial impervious surface (2018), urban and built-up area. 0.6% of ice-free land.
The data centres that house exchange matching engines and colocation space are a few hundred thousand m² globally (below 0.001 million km²).
Energy
EJ/yr (final energy)
The annual final energy attributable to each layer's activity. The allocation rule is in meta.enerji_paylastirma_kurali. World total final energy 440 EJ (2022).
14 EJ, mining 7.5 EJ (1.7% of global final energy) + on-site energy of agriculture, forestry and fishing 6 EJ (human and animal power excluded).
175 EJ, manufacturing and construction final energy 130 EJ (feedstock / non-energy use excluded) + freight transport 45 EJ (the freight share of global transport final energy; passenger excluded).
130 EJ, residential and commercial building operation (heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, appliances); 30% of global final energy. Construction energy is in L1.
1.7 EJ, data centre electricity consumption 460 TWh (2022); data-transmission networks add 1 EJ more. The slice carrying financial trading is a small fraction of this total.
Time scale, renewal / decision time
order of magnitude in seconds
The natural cycle time of the matter or decision the layer processes. The sayisal field is an order of magnitude in seconds, not a point measurement.
Tens of millions of years: coal formed in the Carboniferous (300-360 Mya). A year of fossil-fuel use equals 400 years of current land-vegetation production.
One harvest season to a few years, the agricultural growth cycle is 90-330 days (FAO crop calendars); industrial supply and plant build times run from months to a few years.
Generational and legal horizons, 99-year land leases, transfer across generations by inheritance (a generation is 25-30 years). A property claim is as durable as the law that protects it.
Microseconds to milliseconds: human reaction 250 ms, New York-Chicago physical floor 3.93 ms, FPGA in-chip decision 1,000 ns.
Fragility, dominant shock type
shock type + example
The systemic-shock type that most threatens each layer, with one concrete sourced example.
Resource depletion and tailings-dam failure. Example: on 25 January 2019 the Brumadinho tailings dam (Vale, Brazil) collapsed, 270 dead, 12 million m³ of mine tailings released.
Logistics chokepoint disruption. Example: in March 2021 the Ever Given closed the Suez Canal for six days, $9.6 billion of trade per day was held up and close to 400 ships queued.
Asset-price collapse and balance-sheet crisis. 151 systemic crises since 1970; median output loss 30% of trend GDP.
Liquidity evaporation / flash crash. Example: the 6 May 2010 Flash Crash, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 998 points (9%) intraday and recovered within 36 minutes; liquidity withdrew within minutes.
Ontological status, legal/philosophical anchor
conceptual anchor
The base each layer rests on: physical law, engineering, positive law, convention. Conceptual; each cell is anchored to a real reference.
Conservation of mass and thermodynamics. Matter is neither created nor destroyed; the economy moves it from high concentration to irreversible disorder (the materials-balance principle, the entropy law).
Chemistry and engineering. Transformation is bound by the fixed laws of stoichiometry, materials science and process engineering; exergy (available work) falls at every step.
Positive law, 'the code of capital': what turns an asset into wealth is not its substance but the legal attributes the state enforces on it.
Trust, liquidity and convention: a market works on shared belief that the price is real and the counterparty will pay. Liquidity is an institutional product.