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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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