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.

“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.

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.