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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It’s measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that’s not a neoliberal thing at all.

    Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That’s what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.

    Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that’s more like selling off an inheritance. And that’s not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.



  • Those are not the assumptions, but there are indeed a great many problems with measuring productivity.

    Usually, you only count work for money. Cooking dinner at home does not go into the statistic. Ordering dinner from a restaurant does. I would say that it is a problem that the “production” of leisure time is not counted. Of course, it’s not clear how this could be reasonably done.

    “Productivity” already goes some way towards addressing such problems. It is usually GDP divided by hours worked (for money). US Americans work far more hours than their European counter-parts, so that their average incomes are much higher. Whether they are actually richer, depends on the value of “free” time. “Free” in quotes because it does not include necessary work like housework or healthcare visits.

    If you look at a list of countries by productivity, you will find that it more or less matches common intuitions about what the rich countries are. That’s where people want to migrate to, so it does tell you something.