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this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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this assumes that:
with the increase in 'productivity' over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it's 'unsold' or would drive down prices: we wouldn't need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.
Exactly. This neo-liberal drive to constantly grow grow grow is insanity. China produces a lot of low quality shit that goes straight into landfills, simply for the sake of producing. Productivity means nothing.
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.
The point being made is that the global economic order, as built and maintained by our world leaders and “captains of industry”, is obviously not sustainable in a variety of absolutely crucial ways. We need to find a less capitalistic and more humanist dynamic to orchestrate our society by. It’s becoming more and more clear that simply assigning dollar-value amounts to everything and then comparing them is not a good holistic strategy for managing the efforts and direction of a civilization.
Running anything means understanding the facts you are facing. Running a society means looking at statistics. You must know what they say or do not say. Someone who does not know what "productivity" means is not going to be part of the solution.
what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn't view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?
why 'productivity' specifically? why not GDP? or GPI? or SPI? or HDI? or HPI? or GBMI (Goodhart's Bad Metric Index)?
you're right that this character wouldn't be part of a 'solution', under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.
Productivity because it's in the OP.
I used to argue with climate change denialists, so I already know the pitch. I can't be bothered anymore.
That assumes the incomes to follow a similiar spread and productivity gains to actually benefit the workers. But that is not the case. If you look at the median income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income the order is entirely different. And this is not because the people in Ireland only work 25 hours. They work 39 hours.
Productivity by itself, even accounting for how many hours people work, is not a suitable metric to adress how well the people benefit from the economy. What we see it more and more productivity being siphoned off for ultra rich people. So cutting that part out would not harm the life quality of normal people at all. It would even benefit them, as ultra rich could not as agressively buy up houses and other investments that used to be reachable for working class people.
No, that doesn't assume any of that. I don't even know why you would think that.
AFAIK, the Irish situation is because multi-nationals get to pretend that they make their profits there for tax purposes. On paper they produce stuff there and pay the low taxes. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting
It's a known issue and has been for years. But you can see the problem. It's a complicated issue. People who might care aren't even able to get their heads around the very simple textbook definition of "productivity".