Auroran Economy

The Communion of Worlds has a computer-based, primarily intellectual economy which first originated in its current form on the planet Berharap. The economy is a very open system, but nevertheless has a significant degree of indirect central control.

Economic Sectors
The Auroran economy is split into four main sectors; extraction (farming and mining), industrial (manufacturing), services (management and retail) and intellectual (science and technology); these can be used to show how the Auroran economy has evolved over time, right from the start of Auroran civilisation.

After the Agricultural Revolution, Auroran civilisation began as an extraction economy, as almost all of the labour force was devoted to activities such as farming, hunting, fishing, and later mining; only a marginally small number of workers were devoted to industry, an even smaller number to services, and a negligible few to study and innovation. This continued for many thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution, in which the number of manufacturing workers exceeded the number of farming and mining workers; the number of services and intellectual workers also increased slightly, but intellectual workers remained marginal. Next was the much less noticeable Services Revolution, in which the number of extraction workers now fell to just a few percent of the total labour force, while the number of industrial workers also went down, meaning the majority of the labour force now worked in the services sector; for the first time, the intellectual sector began to employ more people than the agricultural sector. Finally, there was the Intellectual Revolution, in which employment figures became a 'mirror image' of those before the Industrial Revolution; almost all of the labour force was devoted to study and innovation, only a marginally small number of workers were devoted to services, an even smaller number to industry, and a negligible few to farming and mining.

It should be noted that the above revolutions were not absolute throughout all of Auroran civilisation, but each happened in different places over several centuries; for example, a precious few regions still had industrial economies when the first intellectual economies emerged. Today, the Communion of Worlds as a whole can generally be considered an intellectual economy.