
Ask HN: How do you make sense of the economy - codex-paulus
I&#x27;m often struck by the sheer number and variety of companies and jobs that exist in the economy. I can often go through the list of businesses in an office park and find something I had no idea was a business, ex., fabricator of plastic grocery store displays. Obviously someone has to make them but I would never think of that as a business. I contrast this with the seeming lack of business opportunities I come up with. I know that this lack of opportunities is just an illusion caused by my narrow experience, so how can I overcome this? I try to take advantage of interactions with random people to find out what they do but I&#x27;m wondering if there is something more systematic I could do?
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AnimalMuppet
You could look through the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes.
That will give an overview of what exists.

Fair warning, though: If you see, say, "Rubber and plastic footwear" (code
3021), and you think "Hey, there ought to be some low-hanging fruit there -
how hard could it be?", well, you will probably find that the state of the art
there is considerably more sophisticated than you thought.

That is: I suspect that picking a category, and deciding that there should be
some opportunity there, is a poor way to proceed.

~~~
codex-paulus
Yes. I suspect this is the case as well. I guess I just don't like restricting
my self to such an arbitrary process as the industries I have direct
experience in or happen to know people in (lots of overlap between these two
categories)

