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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?
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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