There are two things to consider when talking about productivity. The best way I can explain it is with a little story.
There was a contest where contestants had to find a box in a forest based only on a photograph of an item. There were two contestants. One was a spry young fellow who has never been to this particular forest. The other was a limping 60 year old woman who has lived nearby and knows these woods like the back of here hand.
The pistol fires and off they go. The young man takes off running. He runs here, runs there, runs circles, looking for something familiar from the photo. His endurance is uncanny and his ability to jump across branches second-to-none.
The lady looks at the photo and studies it. After a few minutes, she takes her walking stick and limps off. She recognized the rocks in the photo and knows more or less where to go to find the box.
The young fellow is much more productive in "miles ran per hour", or "acres searched", or in "O2-consumption-per-mile" metrics. For the lady, the above metrics are dismal. However, she beats the man in the most important "boxes found" metrics.
Nowadays, in the US, a lot of the grueling and repetitive work is done by machines. In order to be successful (whatever that means) you often don't need to run quickly, but you need to know where to go and how to get there. So what if 151 million people are working 1789 hours per year (1) for a total of 27 billion hours worked, if a good number of those hours are productively spent doing things which are in the end deemed useless, are unnecessary, or are done incorrectly.
It all comes down to quality vs. quantity in the end.
There was a contest where contestants had to find a box in a forest based only on a photograph of an item. There were two contestants. One was a spry young fellow who has never been to this particular forest. The other was a limping 60 year old woman who has lived nearby and knows these woods like the back of here hand.
The pistol fires and off they go. The young man takes off running. He runs here, runs there, runs circles, looking for something familiar from the photo. His endurance is uncanny and his ability to jump across branches second-to-none.
The lady looks at the photo and studies it. After a few minutes, she takes her walking stick and limps off. She recognized the rocks in the photo and knows more or less where to go to find the box.
The young fellow is much more productive in "miles ran per hour", or "acres searched", or in "O2-consumption-per-mile" metrics. For the lady, the above metrics are dismal. However, she beats the man in the most important "boxes found" metrics.
Nowadays, in the US, a lot of the grueling and repetitive work is done by machines. In order to be successful (whatever that means) you often don't need to run quickly, but you need to know where to go and how to get there. So what if 151 million people are working 1789 hours per year (1) for a total of 27 billion hours worked, if a good number of those hours are productively spent doing things which are in the end deemed useless, are unnecessary, or are done incorrectly.
It all comes down to quality vs. quantity in the end.
(1): https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS