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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 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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