I agree that refining is manufacturing, and so does the original poster. But what about my follow-up question: Do the engineers who design the refinery also create wealth?
(By the way, please feel free to jump in at any time—these are very public conversations.)
I had to think about that for a while. And after careful consideration, I would have to say yes. My reasoning is that, as I said in my previous post, manufacturing takes raw materials and processes them into a finished product. That process can have many steps. One step in that process is creating the tool(s) to do the actual processing, in this case engineering a refinery, so creation of those tools used in the manufacturing process is one step in the larger manufacturing picture. While the engineering itself is not a direct step in the manufacturing process, it does fall within the ripple effect that is needed to support manufacturing.