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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?
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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