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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'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.
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.
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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