But it seems this "economic value" is often created by depleting actual physical resources (e.g. people's health, clean air and water), usually resources belonging someone other than the person capturing the "value".
"Economic value" is great stuff and kind of all-encompassing.
But a lot of it is mainly moving money around after wealth has already been created, sometimes generations earlier.
To this day the lion's share of "creating wealth" is traceable to natural resources.