> That's a contradiction. Productivity is defined as output divided by hours worked. Output is defined roughly as "sales of things that people want".
I used the wrong word, I meant 'overall economic production'. Economic participation is falling during this "recovery", and that is not just due to baby boomers aging: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-the-real-unemplo...
> work that pays nothing is very often work that nobody wants done
I disagree, but I think this disagreement boils down to underlying problems I see with the ways in which we tend to measure economic output and GDP.
If I write a poem that brings me no pleasure and I sell it to you, and you write a poem that brings you no pleasure and you sell it to me. That "counts" as economic productions. However, if I write a poem that brings me pleasure and you write a poem that brings you pleasure and nothing is sold, the same value is produced but it doesn't "count" towards economic production.
You may not like poetry, but there are tons of other examples:
Grandparents who babysit their grandchildren, people who fix their own cars, people who grow and cook their own food, people who write open source software, people who volunteer with non-profits, the list goes on and on.
> At some level the notion of productive work must be tied to an exchange of goods or services or else the phrase becomes kind of meaningless.
While it is hard to measure productive work that isn't tied to the exchange of goods or services, that doesn't make that work meaningless, nor does it mean it has no value.
Conversely, I would argue that there is a large amount of "unproductive work" or "busy work" that doesn't really produce value, but does involve the exchange of goods and services. Specific examples are controversial, but some potential ones are: fighting frivolous lawsuits, political fundraising, defensive patents, and many types of advertising.
see: https://medium.com/basic-income/basic-income-meaningless-job...
I think many of these many of these jobs provide "competitive advantage" in marketplace but produce little to no actual value to society. Every corporation needs someone doing these jobs so they can stay competitive, but it ends up becoming an arms race of economic waste.
My hope is that by reducing the necessity of work that get paid well, we are able to start weeding out some of the BS work and enabling people to do more of the less/un paid work that produces hard to measure value.
I think we should accomplish this by incrementally phasing in basic income pair with gradually phasing out minimum wage. Each increment should happen at the start of a recession so the the increase in government spending on BI paired with the availability of cheaper labor (due to lower minimum wage) can prompt growth and shorten the recession.