&gt; there is a reason we have labor productivity statistics that try to quantify this<p>Productivity measures have been pretty screwed since services became the dominant labour form.  If my dog groomer decides to charge me an extra 20% then her productivity has gone up by 20% - she is now producing an extra 20% of services per hour.<p>&gt; But with most jobs are already meaningless from the viewpoint of economic productivity<p>I have no proof of this at all - just an anecdotal gut feel.  For every content producer where I work, we have 2 agile coaches, a LEAN coach, 2 marketing types (who are probably the really productive workers - promoting and protecting an established brand monopoly), 5 ops and dev supporters (in an unreachable call centre somewhere in the world), and then an endless pyramid of middle and upper management overseeing all this process.  Within this context, no one every got a pay upgrade by volunteering to reduce the size of their empire.<p>And, also within this context, there is a lot of unhappiness that I put down to lack of meaningful labour output making the world a better place.  Meanwhile, my leisure time productivity has exploded - I consume whatever media I want in whatever form I want whenever I want.  I&#x27;m at the lower socio-economic end of my tiny middle-class ecosystem but my diet would be the envy of the kings of yesteryear.<p>My point being is that we already have too much stuff in the world, and the existing system of trading labour for putting food on the table just encourages more stuff.  I would agree that we are far from pareto efficient and are, in fact, trapped in a scheme where scarce resources like primary goods and human time are wasted.  But I have no idea what the solution might look like.