If you look at the economy narrowly as purely making stuff then economics typically frames this within factors of production. These are land, labour, capital and possibly technology or entrepreneurship depending on how you define these terms. Land can contain the natural resources of the earth for simplicity's sake. These are the inputs as you describe.

But this is only really a part of the picture when considering what makes an economy where you get more into subjective value and coordination. The other comment is a rather good one.

Because I can’t explain “the economy” in an Reddit post entirely I will do my best in a small example/explanation.

You can see this economy as this kind of circle with some smaller circles around it. We have all decided that we will live with a system that gives us a digital or physical piece of paper to pay with. The economy revolves around the value, sustainability and usefulness of that product (money). That is the main circle.

You could see that part of the start of the main circle is raw materials, like for example that of farmers, miners and loggers. Then we need some people to transform the raw material into something. Factory workers, builders who build a house or Cooks. Then we need people to buy the iPhone, buy or invest in the building and go out to eat. The thing is that everyone in that circle pretty much needs something from not only their own profession:( Money and Maybe a house) but also from the other professions, like an iPhone or food, this does of course include the farmer who grew the ingredients for the food or the miner who dug up the gold for the iPhone. So to put it simpel it is a circle build around the needs and demands, but also the money we have chosen to exchange products with

Does that answer it a bit ?

If I understood you correctly: Aside from energy and cold, there's no other input that's really fundamental in the way you thinking. Most processes we consider "labor" consume energy and generate heat, and other than that deciding how to do things or where to source your energy/cold from is only a matter of efficiency. For material goods, you could always (with enormous difficulty/cost) create matter from energy, and arrange it the right way by "spending" some cold/negentropy, but if you want to make steel, mining abundant iron ore is much easier. If not:

Two people can exchange goods and both be better off, and that's the basis of trade.

We create valuable things where there were none (e.g. food, buildings, a concert) or make things more valuable by changing how accessible they are, moving them, changing their form, giving them to people who value them more, getting more information about them, etc. and we do all of this because each person doing it considers it better than not doing it. That's only because they get paid, usually, but that also happens because bosses consider paying workers to be better than not doing it. And so on.

I don't really get what you mean by "injecting value", but aside from food and steel you also value more abstract things like information, law and safety, consistency, personal connections, entertainment, and others. Every time service work happens, some of this kind of value is newly generated.

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It would help to narrow down this question quite a bit more. For instance, what do you mean by "economy" or even "value"? An economy in the broadest sense is just a grouping of interdependent entities (people) all trying to do things they want/need to do. Sometimes goals overlap and individuals form larger groups (institutions) to better achieve those goals. Forming a School, a State, a body to oversee a Currency... these are all results of some form of collective decision making (note: NOT necessarily democratic either!). These institutions serve some better than others. Entities and people try to achieve goals the best they can within and around them. As such, "how" the economy functions is directly related the the institutions (policy) in place.

So an economy in a political system where people look out for themselves will look different from one where corporate interests come first or one where more public or collectivists interests are the behavioral norms.

There will always be some kind of "economy" as long as people are interdependent in their goals.

If you want a more academic and in-depth overview specific to western economy and how we got here, "Institutional Economics" by John R Commons is incredibly cohesive. There are also more modern books on the topic.