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Productivity can't really be defined, let alone measured. When people start talking about it they have left hard facts behind I'm afraid...



Maybe not for what most of us do but for a lot of jobs, especially blue collar jobs, it absolutely can be measured down to the smallest increment. If you work on an assembly line, or really anything that isn't mostly knowledge work, your productivity can be measured very accurately.


How many people do knowledge work vs assembly work these days? Plus WFH is really not for manual work. And that's without getting into the fact that on an assembly line you can only go as fast as the slowest worker, so everyone's productivity is capped. Or looking at things like error/defect rates that contradict "items per minute" definitions of productivity.

People think you can measure this as a single number. At best, for a very limited number of workers, who don't WFH anyway, you can measure it. But you cannot compare those workers with the workers next to them doing similar but slightly different jobs even.

So it's a huge mess and the idea of a graph of it for the USA is like making a graph of the average number of testicles. Except people take it seriously!?




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