We Should Be Measuring Well-Being Catalysis, Not (trying and largely failing to measure) Economic Productivity

The problem with ‘productivity’ is that it is concerned with managing and increasing output: producing widgets, quarterly reports, the next release of the software, yet another research report, and meanwhile, always aspiring to do more with less. Less waste, less idle time on the assembly line, and fewer workers. The end game is to speed up the mac... See more

Their gospel of optimisation ignores the fundamental question: what’s the point of being 10x more productive if we’re not 10x more fulfilled?

I think productivity is really a race to the bottom um it's I think that the that a lot has been said about how humans uh or machines are trying to be more human but I think less has been said about how humans have for decades uh been trained to be machines

and we have a lot of unlearning to do because if we focus on efficiency and optimization and

... See more

The concept of efficiency — how much one can accomplish per unit of time (or per dollar, etc.) — requires a quantitative numerator as well as a denominator. It requires a metric. Therefore, it tells us nothing about results we cannot quantify or measure. When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while t... See more