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Who counts as "productive"? In the Bill and Shelley thread people are using the word to mean anything from "blameless" to "civilizationally load-bearing." Having a definition for "productive" is important to enable people who disagree to converse, otherwise everyone's talking past each other. The best candidate I've seen is "reducing the per-unit cost of a good or service." On this definition Bill and Shelley are obviously not currently productive, since they just spend money and therefore bid up prices of things. The guy who invented the GMO rice is obviously extremely productive, since he made rice way cheaper for millions of people. But what if Bill and Shelley grow one carrot this year, and eat it instead of buying one at the store. They have, in some small way, reduced the per-unit cost of carrots, but this wouldn't be enough for us to call them productive. There's some ratio of how-much-you-reduced-prices to how-much-you-bid-them-up that most people seem to have in mind when they call someone productive in a strictly economic sense. We don't have to quibble over what that ratio is, but it seems to get hard when you consider someone working as a small cog in the Apple machine, or the Toyota machine. Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice. What definition are you using? How do you tell who is productive?
Productivity is another very sad word that is used in economics while having also colloquial meaning. Productivity is a simple economic concept meaning how much money you earned by selling products and services you produced, nothing more, nothing less. It has weird implications like for instance a janitor working for Goldman Sachs in one of their office buildings being more productive than a janitor in 3rd world country or even in government building as the former has higher wage and company he works for rakes in more revenue and profit. If you invented something amazing but made it free, your productivity did not increase. If million other people took your invention and used it to improve their bottom line, it is calculated independently. If you look at it, it is not as strange as it seems. In broad sense productivity per person is increased by using capital. In a sense living in a large city with sophisticated infrastructure enabling various network effects makes everybody more productive even if they moved there yesterday and did not contribute anything building that infrastructure.
But of course productivity also has colloquial meaning, which than translates to various value judgements talking about things like bullshit jobs, how government jobs are nonproductive or how it is unfair that two workers working with the same machine producing the same number of parts should be considered as similarly productive.
By the way there are many such "economics" words and concepts that have the same issue of being a technical term while also having normal colloquial meaning - even basic ones such as capital, savings, the act of saving, investment and many more. It also does not help that even economists or journalists are using these meanings interchangeably thus needlessly confusing the whole discussion.
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I find productivity a particularly tricky concept in fields that don't, well, produce things in the traditional sense. For instance, I work in a caring profession. I spend most of my work time talking to people, logging that I talked to people, diagnosing people in need of being talked to, and bringing in outside specialists to talk to people. I don't prescribe any medicines, and I don't build or create anything physical. The outcomes of my work are all psychological - if I'm doing my job right, I make people feel better about their lives.
Is that productive? How would you go about quantitatively measuring my work? The best we can do is send around surveys and ask people how happy they are, and try to get some statistics going, but in my experience the survey process is so messy and full of confounders that I just don't think it tells us much.
Productivity seems like a measure that comes out of physical industries, like agriculture or manufacturing. It is easy to measure productivity when there is some kind of measurable product at the end. Is this farm more productive than that farm? Easy, let's look at how much grain each produces. It gets more complicated around manufacturing - a smaller number of higher quality products versus a larger number of lower quality products - but at least some of the same principles seem to apply.
But there is a lot of work that produces ephemeral things. Lots of work produces experiences. How do you measure, say, the productivity of a chef? At the most basic level, number of people fed, I guess, but in practice what a chef - and a whole restaurant - produces is not a certain number of calories on a plate, but rather a whole dining experience, and that's what people pay for.
Bare productivity seems like a useful metric in some contexts, but I am wary of applying it globally.
I think the real question is more like, "How much do we value this work?" That's inevitably a values-laden question, and cannot be answered outside of particular cultural contexts.
The question around the retirees is more about earning or deserving. Do these people deserve the benefits they are currently receiving? Have they earned them by doing work that other people value or appreciate? But that seems like a subtly different question to productivity, to me.
I mean you can measure productivity as "$ value produced/hour" which will tell you the productivity a chef. A more productive chef is either one who's skill allows them to charge obscene amounts for high quality food, or one who's ability to produce food is enhanced with machinery/capital goods. It's one of the reasons why restaurants keep getting more expensive, Baulmol's cost disease + not a lot of labour saving machines in the last 50 years.
Weirdly this implies a sous chef at fancy restaurant is way more productive than a McDonald's worker at a busy location, who probably processes an order of magnitude more calories than they do. But that's just what happens when a society is this efficient at producing carrots, shoes, etc.
I think your job is the same. It's productive because it's valuable enough to pay for. People take money they could have spent on carrots or shoes and instead give it to your company. Clearly it's valuable to them.
Western economies are built on services now, they're definitely productive.
It has to ground out in something more than just pay, though, doesn't it? The idea that anything is productive if people are willing to pay for it would seem to make the idea of an unproductive or wasteful job impossible. But in practice we seem to understand that there are jobs that draw a paycheck without providing any real benefit.
I'd like to believe there's a difference between jobs like mine, which do produce benefits even if those benefits are not easily measured, and jobs that simply don't produce benefits at all.
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I'm not convinced.
What percentage of the labor force feels their job are bullshit (creating PowerPoint slides nobody looks at, writing code for projects that get canceled, ect.)? What percentage of the labor force does redundant work (picking a 10 year old meme to avoid AI complications: how many startups selling monthly subscriptions to Kanban boards does an economy really need? Or on a larger scales: How on earth are Nissan, Landrover and Mini still selling even a single car?)
The West has an established culture on how to operate businesses, and many of those businesses make money. But this could be a local maximum in productivity under current conditions, not a global maximum. That's why I'm so fascinated by the rise of China. I'm curious to see what kind of maximum they'll find.
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Generally, a good philosophical rule of thumb estimate for your goodness of a person from a utilitarian perspective is: What is the net utility of all humans in the world other than yourself in the world where you exist, minus a counterfactual world in which you don't exist? If everyone is better off because you're here doing things, then you're doing a good job. If people would be better off if you never existed then you're a leech.
Obviously this is not computible in practice, and maybe needs a couple of epicycles to reduce random variation that isn't your fault (what if your mom dies in childbirth?), but is a good rule of thumb estimate.
"Productive" seems like the same sort of question just mostly restricted to economic utilities and leaving off emotional ones (a particularly saintly homeless man on welfare who goes around being kind to everyone and making their day brighter might increase net utility but be unproductive in economic terms).
If you could thanos snap Bill and Shelley out of existence then all the money they were going to extract from taxes and spend on things could be given to other people to spend, so everyone else would be better off. Assuming they vanish at conception, and if their government jobs were just pencil pushing then nothing is lost and we save money. If you could thanos snap the guy who invented GMO rice out of existence then GMO rice doesn't exist, or takes much longer for someone else to invent, and everyone is worse off.
If someone is a small cog in a machine and the company is paying them a salary for their work, then their productivity depends on whether the company is wisely paying their money or has been tricked into overpaying for an unnecessary managerial position or a slacker. If you thanos snapped them out of existence, would the company's profits go up or down? For the majority of cogs, it would go down, because the upper management is paying them less than it earns from their labor (otherwise, how else could it earn a profit). So they're productive. But this has exceptions, who sap money from the productivity of those around them and lower the average.
Thank you for putting my feelings into words better than I would have
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I think that what is "productive" is obviously a value judgement. Someone whose contribution to the economy is to lower the market price for contract killings is obviously not what most people have in mind when they think of a productive member of society. One way to model this is to say that murder has very high externalities which the compensation structure fails to address.
Of course, while most people might agree on some cases like the contract killer not being considered productive and a physician curing some debilitating illness being productive, the quantification of the externalities of lot of different occupations is in the eye of the beholder. What for might be an innocent way to improve people's life might for someone else exemplify everything that is wrong with society. Sesame street, recreational fentanyl use, warhammer, cigarettes, cosmetic surgery, prostitution, fast cars, organized religion, alcohol, daycare for kids, social media, electric lights, abortions, candy, veggie burgers, beef burgers, small arms, pornography, cosmetic products, video games, AI capabilities, warfare capabilities, caffeine, assisted suicide, rap music, are all things where some people will disagree about the externalities.
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I've increasingly wrestled with this. I write software. To the best of my knowledge, not one line of code I've ever written in my entire professional career has made anyone's life better in any way. I've worked on government contracts for systems that for whatever reason never reach actual deployment. My cantankerous nature, and endlessly arguing with FAA and NASA points of contact about why they are wrong may have helped someone somewhere in the instances where I've been born out to be correct, despite my boss wishing I'd just go along to get along because the government signs our checks.
Sometimes I contribute to open source projects. I fixed a bug or two in Sergey Kiselev's 8088 BIOS, and years ago I rewrote the gamepad/joystick code for 86Box, but I'm pretty sure that's all been further rewritten since. Those two things probably made more people better off, niche as they may be, than anything I've written professionally.
Currently the most valuable thing I've contributed to my nation and my culture is my child, who we're trying to raise in the best tradition of the west. I try to make beautiful furniture for my family, and we raise chickens and garden. In the sense of GDP being a measure of economist paying each other to eat shit, these activities don't do much. But they are invaluable to me, and profoundly meaningful.
In a sense my life has been the tax payer indirectly paying me to write useless code. I've then taken that money, and invested it into crypto and stocks and now I'm more or less set for life. There are days it doesn't feel good. It didn't start this way. When I first began working on these contracts I thought I was making things that would be used to make the world better. 20 years later it would be delusional to think that has happened. But now I'm in too deep. It's my career, I have obligations and responsibilities, personally as well as professionally. I keep hoping maybe the next contract will be more than a make work exercise.
This is the reason why so many people tolerate the toxic culture of gamedev. All the crunch and inevitable downsizing are worth it just because you know for sure that your work has made some people very happy.
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I work for a company that sells financial products designed to help people obtain property, with some government assistance paying into those plans. I will never obtain property myself because in between taxes, I-can't-believe-it's-not-taxes, costs of living and the complete absence of any welfare for above-average-salaried employees, my family just barely scrapes by and there's nothing left to invest. That's...is that irony?
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That sounds personally frustrating, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as someone who does not sell their labor at all and just games the system. You are contributing to a market that helps generate enormous value for the economy even if your code doesn’t end up doing useful things. The fact that someone else is using the threat of violence to separate other citizens from their wealth and then buy your labor with it doesn’t mean you aren’t usefully providing labor to the software market. That capital allocation decision is on them, not you. If a sawmill sells their product to someone who just immediately burns the wood, I would still credit the mill workers and owners with being productive.
This kind of buying of labor that is not actually useful happens in the private sector as well. Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw. It’s really common among startups, but I still think founders and early stage workers are contributing more than I am as someone who just checks in to my corporate gig. They are part of the great beating heart that keeps the economy going in a more direct way than I am, even if they just work on a chain of unfortunate failures.
If you started a company that could produce ten million dollars in goods, and nine other people did the same thing, but there was only room in the market for one company, it would be silly to say that one person produced 10 million and the other nine whose company failed are parasites. This should be counted as ten people producing 1 million each; if there's risk, everyone should get credit for the average amount, even if by luck some will produce more and some less.
Writing software for someone who doesn't do anything useful with it is similar. Making software, or anything that isn't a finished product, can in general be productive, yet any specific instance of it may lead to the end user producing a lot, or producing nothing at all. Which one you get depends on luck. So you should get credit for the amount of productivity that can be credited to developers like you, averaged over all possible customers, even if due to bad luck it so happens that your particular customer isn't producing anything.
(Of course, you have to be careful with reference classes. Maybe you're the only programmer who programs system X. That doesn't mean that since there's only one programmer, there's no average; you probably want to average among all programmers in some larger category.)
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I guess my nitpick is, is the sawmill's only customer a government program that buys it's laboriously milled wood and then immediately burns it? Would the sawmill even exist but for this senseless government program? What if the government then further paid to have those laboriously milled planks further refined into exquisitely crafted chairs... and then burned them in a heap year after year as if they were just minimally processed firewood?
Furthermore, imagine the entire industry, which knew precisely what the deal was, started scamming the government? Instead of S4S lumber, the mill was just churning out rough planks, saving itself the time and expense, but kept charging the government at the S4S rate? And the chair makers, taking this rough lumber that hadn't even been properly kiln dried, just roughly hacked it apart with circular saws instead of any sort of proper cabinet saw, and stuck things that were technically chairs together with brad nails and hot glue. Of course they too also still billed the government for the hours and expense of finely crafted chairs. And then the government, receiving these unfinished, wobbly, barely held together "chairs" that had come half apart in shipping just nodded satisfactorily, paid the exorbitant price, and gave them to the fire.
I've been a chair maker in this scheme my entire life, except my chairs are code. The things I've seen I probably shouldn't publicly disclose. Some are in the past, some are ongoing. I've encountered start ups run by veterans who charge into this space, knowing how awful it is, thinking they will be the company that makes the thing that will at last bring value to the problem the government has been funding solutions to for the last 40 years and then burning on a fire. I've seen them eventually give up, and join the scam realizing there is no point. I've seen companies that were only ever in it for the scam. I've seen people too stupid to realize the difference between the rough planks they make and the S4S planks that they should be making, profoundly proud of having achieved nothing. They look at the size of their paycheck, the leased BMW it affords them, and assume they must be a valuable participant in the economy. They're leasing a BMW after all, how could they not be?
I compare this to the multi generational welfare consuming congenital felon, and I'd truly, truly like to believe I'm different. But sometimes the intrusive thoughts say otherwise. At least the military industrial complex really gets people killed. I'm not sure anything I've done has had any measurable outcome beyond driving up the national debt.
You may be part of a problem... but it's not this particular problem, unless you're one of the people running the scam.
The real question is, what do you want to do about it? You've mentioned that you're flirting with Fuck You money. Have you weighed the merits of reaching out to DOGE, or some other, better choice?
Honestly ICE's signing bonus has been the most attractive offer I've seen, were I going to attempt to make a positive change in my country.
The biggest impediment to taking on more risk to exit the scam laden public/private industry I'm in has been health insurance. I have it, my family needs it, and privately insuring my family is the single biggest factor making me doubt I'm as close to "Fuck You money" as I am on paper with my current assets and burn rate.
That and the friends I have who did take the jump out of the industry to start their own businesses, and came crawling back broke (at best) having wasted a decade of their life's savings.
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But you’re a programmer, not a government fail project maker. You have a very general skill set. You could in principle take a job programming in industry right? Unless you are not a programmer and are in some way specialized only to government work, in which case your argument seems to have a bit more merit. I still don’t really consider any line employee who goes to work and tries their hardest at their job every day a parasite. Maybe some are on a strict economic level, but on the moral level I don’t think they are. The exception to this would be certain industries and specializations that are just inherently parasitic like DEI consultants or patent troll lawyers.
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This taps into a key point which is that for a huge range of activities, it's hard to know if they ever actually contribute and how much, regardless of whether they add to GDP or don't at all, and that even activities that fail completely can still 'contribute' in a loose sense of being in the direction of something others approve of. Even claiming benefits but being a good friend could plausibly bring far greater economic and moral good to the world than not existing as you might (just for example) unknowingly save someone from suicide.
For this reason one should think very carefully before deciding others are unproductive or parasitic based only on headline facts.
"Is the Juicero founder a parasite" might be a hard question, but "Is this generational welfare recipient who has never worked a legitimate job a day in their life" is not, and one generally only brings up the first to tsk-tsk anyone objecting to the second.
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Value is subjective, which is why free markets, voluntary exchange, and the ability to fail based around private property rights are so important for creating price signals. Are Bill and Shelley taking a lower salary than they could earn in the private sector, or are they overpaid for their output? Is a musician who can’t fill a local bar more valuable than Nike’s top designer? Who knows...
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Someone is productive if they increase the sum total longterm wellbeing of the citizen directly or indirectly. A homeless man who gives out compliments in exchange for alms is productive; a tech CEO who outsources to foreigners or designs an addicting endless scroll algorithm is only parasitic. The guy who made billions selling sugary yogurt under the pretense of it being healthful is parasitic; the retiree who allows his neighbor to eat an apple from his tree is productive. The unemployed musician who lives off welfare is more productive than the most effective worker at Nike or Labubu International or whatever, because his efforts are at least toward the common good.
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Everyone involved in the production of alcohol is productive: anything else is a luxury good that can be cut in times of austerity. Of course, you need a military to defend your distilleries, a road network to connect those distilleries to hops and barley farms, as well as to their final markets. Maybe a bauxite mine to get the aluminium to can it all. And then a tax collecting scheme to ensure that those militaries are paid. Oh, and I suppose all those beermakers, soldiers, farmers, and miners need wives, too. So we'll need a few women around.
With those necessary individuals, civilization can be preserved.
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"Participating in the economy such that your presence creates more 'value' (as defined by economic activity) than the value of the resources you consume."
At the 'firm' level, a nonproductive worker would be one who doesn't do enough useful work (as captured on the company's books) to exceed the amount they're paid.
Nonproductive isn't inherently bad, if for example someone runs off to live in the woods and just lives in a cabin with basic necessities.
But if you're nonproductive AND not paying your own way, your presence can be a net drag on said economy.
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They're contribution per unit is small, but there are a lot of units and the per unit contributions really add up. Just because it's hard to see the contribution because it's really spread out doesn't reduce the size of the contribution.
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This is one of those things you need to be really smart to think up something beyond the obvious. If over the course of your life you pay more in taxes than you receive in direct or indirect, yes including multiple layers of being a downstream beneficiary from infrastructure spending or whatever, then you are from at least a public perspective productive. There are some edge cases, intangibles and arguments on the margin but this basically covers it for 95% of people.
I think centering this on taxes (though understandable in this context because we are talking about government subsidies) misses a big part of what productivity is about: value provided to others who utilize your outputs. You could run a business that makes a great product that serves millions of people and just squeaks by breaking even, paying no taxes. That is still highly productive.
This is why, even if the "Amazon pays no taxes" meme were true, this would not make them a leech: they provide so much value to millions (billions?) of consumers.
I think you are overthinking this to try and be general enough to be inclusive of worlds very unlike our own. Yes, in some kind of libertarian utopia with no taxes this all breaks down. And there could be as many as a dozen people in the US who are miscategorized because of your objections here. But it's just not true that amazon doesn't pay taxes, it's just not true that you can run a company, big or small, without spending a significant amount on your own taxes be they salary or capital gains even if we don't credit you with payroll or other corporate taxes, even granting that there are still consumption taxes.
Yes, I agree, above and beyond the more simple analysis some people provide even more value just through their voluntary transactions. But point to someone who is significant on that scale and you will be pointing at someone who is also a net lifetime tax contributor. I only insist on this simple analysis because it undercuts a lot of usually unproductive heehawing about how actually in some theoretical universe the people obviously taking more than they give are really, if you squint, providing a benefit by not being even more value destroying.
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A simple answer in my opinion will be, how much money they made, as this is a direct proxy of how much others value their action
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Growing one carrot likely doesn't even cover their yearly carrot consumption. A line worker is producing more goods than they are consuming according to Toyota management, the best expert to judge that.
I'd wager that most people are using "produces more than they consume over a roughly decade window with allowances for trade"
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Throwing out enormous clouds of smoke to ignore an "is" because that "is" might lead to an "ought" you don't like is not very effective here. The tactic has been used too much before.
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