Where has all the productivity gone?

This is an interesting and very important point in overall computing today as well - for the vast majority of use cases, many of the todays top patterns are actually not just a small improvement, but are worse. Keyboard shortcuts are usually (not always) faster than mouse/trackpad driven visual pointers. Many of the current UIs are resource hogs that slow things down by a lot. UI patterns have also gotten somewhat less usable - in many cases one cannot easily tell of a surface is clickable in iOS and Android.

For example, washing machines create a lot of extra leisure, because it makes humans productive. A washing-machine assisted human can was 100x as much clothing in a given minute of operation time. But I have no clue where such a productivity improvement would show up in the data.

Of course I can study things like 'how many hours do you spend maintaining your household', and you'd see that dropping decade after decade, despite living in ever larger homes with more functionality (and thus, a larger 'maintenance load'). That's productivity, and stand-alone it can be analysed and concluded as such.

But fitting that into the same productivity data as say, the construction of homes per worker in an elegant way? I don't know how you would do that.

Nor do I know how you account for completely different units across time and sectors. For example, how do we measure productivity of the pharmaceutical industry? Patents per person? Medicines launched? Number of lives saved by vaccines?

A GDP per worked hour is of course a great start. But it leaves a lot out, too. For example, technology that sequences a genome for a penny in a short timespan may indirectly lead to gdp growth, perhaps, but in and of itself that massive cheap boost to a researchers' insight into a genome will not show up as a direct boost to GDP, in fact the opposite.

Curious to understand from economists how such challenges are typically handled and what the data says.

most consumer apps are net negatives that sell digital dopamine hits and studies have shown make people more depressed the more they use them

I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death.

I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many.

If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.