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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.
I work for a company that sells financial products designed to help people obtain property, with some government assistance paying into those plans. I will never obtain property myself because in between taxes, I-can't-believe-it's-not-taxes, costs of living and the complete absence of any welfare for above-average-salaried employees, my family just barely scrapes by and there's nothing left to invest. That's...is that irony?
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