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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?
Productivity is another very sad word that is used in economics while having also colloquial meaning. Productivity is a simple economic concept meaning how much money you earned by selling products and services you produced, nothing more, nothing less. It has weird implications like for instance a janitor working for Goldman Sachs in one of their office buildings being more productive than a janitor in 3rd world country or even in government building as the former has higher wage and company he works for rakes in more revenue and profit. If you invented something amazing but made it free, your productivity did not increase. If million other people took your invention and used it to improve their bottom line, it is calculated independently. If you look at it, it is not as strange as it seems. In broad sense productivity per person is increased by using capital. In a sense living in a large city with sophisticated infrastructure enabling various network effects makes everybody more productive even if they moved there yesterday and did not contribute anything building that infrastructure.
But of course productivity also has colloquial meaning, which than translates to various value judgements talking about things like bullshit jobs, how government jobs are nonproductive or how it is unfair that two workers working with the same machine producing the same number of parts should be considered as similarly productive.
By the way there are many such "economics" words and concepts that have the same issue of being a technical term while also having normal colloquial meaning - even basic ones such as capital, savings, the act of saving, investment and many more. It also does not help that even economists or journalists are using these meanings interchangeably thus needlessly confusing the whole discussion.
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