What about "GDP is detached from the production of hard physical goods and services that satisfy human needs."???

I won't go as far as to claim that Economy is a pseudo science, but like many other disciplines it uses words that are already in use by the general population and redefines them to mean technical concepts. The end result is that economist can make statements that are technically true but that end up conveying a completely different message when listened by a lay person.

In this case, when an economist talks about "productivity", it has a very specific concept in mind. One that has more to do with ROI than with the manufacturing of any thing of value at all. Of course, both concepts are not completely detached from each other (it would be useless to grab a concept to mean something random instead), but they are not 100% aligned either, and this results in misunderstanding, if not actual misleading. By example, when some troubled company talks about "increasing employee productivity", naive employees expect some sort of training program to help them be more effective at their jobs. What they get is a pink slip instead; if productivity is ROI, you can lay off half of your people and use the company's momentum to keep turning 80% of the income, so on paper it will look like you are having better ROI (even if the cuts get too deep and are damaging the long term viability of the business).

We'd like GDP to track what we would consider value, but it need not. It's not hard to find people who will complain that some contribution to GDP is unhelpful, detrimental. It wouldn't be hard to find sour words speaking out against financialization, for example. Economic rents in general can contribute to GDP but intuitively are not 'real value' because otherwise we wouldn't call it rent. Governments can create a lot of worthless work that contributes GDP, but unsustainably. It would be debasing to the word 'value' or 'productivity' to ignore that.

We'd like at least for 'real value' or 'productivity' as intuitively understood to contribute to GDP. That is, from an increase in value one may infer an increase in GDP (usually). I can accept that. I take issue with an inference in the other direction. If I knew how much 'real value' contributed to GDP and how much was in excess of that contribution, I would be an incredibly accomplished economist.

I can buy both yours and TeMPOraL's [0] argument, which I think are roughly saying the same thing. Thanks for the well-reasoned response.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10000123

Maybe you and GP think about different concepts of "productivity". Economic value-add has only a loose correlation with work benefiting individuals and societies. That's the point of "bullshit jobs" concept - we're inventing occupations that feed on one another, wasting people's time and resources but making the numbers go up.

It's like in this story of soldiers who dig up latrines one day, and fill them up on another day. Yes, a lot of people were busy, but in the end, nothing useful got done and lots of man-hours were wasted.

>GDP is a (attempted) measurement of economic value-add. I cannot think of a better definition of productivity in the context of this conversation >Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.

HDI