* Sell, 1,000,000 lottery tickets (or CDOs or Carcinogenic products) -- Boom, you are productive.
* Cure Cancer (or Linux or Wikipedia or an ad-free Educational YouTube Channel) and open source it for free -- Nah, not productive.
As we digitize, more things will be free and yet valuable and these things won't show up as productivity.
It's time to come up with better measurements of productivity
If instead we invest in US productivity destroying activities such as dismantling factories, price gouging, speculation, mass diss-information and distraction machines, net loss corporations, and indefinite warfare. Then you would expect productivity to fall eventually.
Today we produce 1,000,000x more videos/memes/gifs/content 50 years ago and we also consume more of them.
But, those numbers don't show up at all in our productivity measures.
Why would watching "Gone with the Wind" 30 years ago more productive because we paid $10 than watching the same "Gone with the Wind" on a streaming service today (amortized at probably $0.05)
The ability to make sufficient for mass market consumption quality combinations of visual, audio and textual content has gone from being purview of real professionals who do this as their day jobs to something literally anyone with a smartphone, an option and 5min of free time can do.
That is a change to human communication as revolutionary as the telegraph or the telephone. There is definitely some value there. Lord knows who'll capture that value.
Truth is nobody knows how to value those things in terms of money, to be honest I'm not even sure they can be valued the same way as we used to value physical things that got built during a physical production process.
I've seen this problem partially addressed by slightly leftish-leaning economists such as Mariana Mazzucato in "The Value of Everything" [1] and I'm sure there may be others like her, but afaik mainstream economics is still ignoring the issue, I think mainstream economists don't even acknowledge this as being an issue.
[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything
Personally I think we can use Vickrey Auctions for this problem. Vickrey Auctions are able to give not only price discovery, but also value discovery. Everything digital has infinite supplies, that we artificially constrain so as to pump prices. If instead of using price discovery, we use value discovery, the price can stay at 0, so long as a certain (limited) amount of people are faced with a choice that would have them go without.
So for example perhaps we sample 50,000 people and say 75% of people keep access, say when they vote. If you bid in the top 75%, you keep access for the period, and you pay the value that the bottom person that kept access bid. That money is then not used to pay for the IP, some other tax will fund the IP or Open Source Software or Meme, that 25% will then go to all the voters for providing their values. So the average bidder will pay nothing, the below average bidder will lose something they value low, but gain, and the highest bidders will fund that. We then take some other collection and sample another 50,000 people, until we find out the value of all of these digital items to people.
If you do the subsidization process correctly, I think the idea of IP owners holding their supply back would go away, as releasing it to all would always provide more value than holding it back. I think at the very least this would be an obvious answer to Open Source Software, and this would easily fund things like Linux and Firefox. I think this would stretch further to research, and colleges would now be funded through this mechanism, and the professors who currently waste enormous amounts of time doing grant writing would be able to be productive. Thus the whole issue of journals goes away. Even things like ads, people would bid on their service less because of them, so there would be no fundamental reason to include them as it would reduce the subsidy.
There is this weirdly persistent leftist idea of demanding absolute precognition with values for things which are determined in the future and utterly irrelevant and unknown. If I buy coffee beans from locals of Cape Horn growers for my use at the local prices I am helping by supporting local farmers. If I roast them and sell them overseas for 100x the cost I am somehow harming them now.
The Marxist derived notions of value and exploitation are downright certifiably insane.
Of course the problem is that any theory of value like the labor theory has massive holes as well. That's why the current subjective value theory is not really a theory: it's not wrong, it's a placeholder.
30 years ago people valued watching "Gone with the Wind" at $10 and today at $0.05. To serve that, the distributor did a proportional amount of work 30 years ago and today (because it's easier to distribute today). Separately, it would take some effort to produce something equally engaging today with so many entertainment options to choose from.
Linux and free software are also used for thousands of small commercial websites and projects that show up. If everyone had to use Windows Server and SQL Server for their .NET wordpress-style site there would be fewer sites and fewer businesses.
Educational YouTube channels should lead to more educated and therefore more productive people. It could be argued that for better or worse the higher-ed and post-high school systems (degrees, credentials, etc.) have been very slow or even opposed at allowing this extra learning/knowledge to improve career/productivity outlooks.
e.g. Youtube is free but text books have increased X% in price so the net effect is diminished. Learning is easier and cheaper than ever before but most colleges are not using the more efficient learning systems (online classes, MOACs(?)). The cost of college has increased so much that college itself has decreased in productivity, etc.
Also a lot of the time spent on these free/non-profit projects are not counted as labor hours so if anything they should have zero or positive effect on the measured amount of productivity.
(Personally I think HN is responsible. /jk)
"Educational YouTube channels should lead to more educated and therefore more productive people."
Possibly, but also less demand for a big source of labour productivity, which is education.
And of course there is home life: if a Mother (or Father) stays home to mind the kids, all of the effort they do doesn't count towards labour input, GDP etc. but if they were paying someone for it, it would.
How are you going to measure the productivity gains for that one? Many things were involved along the chain: Internet (and Cable networks), Search Engines, Publishing platform, somebody free time, etc...
the concern I think is most evident is that a nearly theatrical number of short-term and long-term issues are becoming insurmountable obstacles to progress at all. having coasted on Quantitative Easing and bond buys since 2008, the market has cheated recession at all turns and subsequently created a corporate credit bubble that has turned the prime interest rate into a third-rail for anyone seeking to raise it to counter now rampant US inflation. many point to 2020 as a recession period, however bond prices and home prices remained high, and it only lasted a month at most as the fed simply injected more cash into the system to "correct" the uncomfortable decline.
the minimum wage hasnt moved in a decade, and most service economy workers (those which make up the backbone of neoliberal capitalist society) faced with the near Sisyphean task of caring for COVID patients at home, educating their kids remotely, and working multiple jobs that offer no healthcare or medical leave reached its absolute breaking point when the government and corporations deputized most of them as mask police to be spit on and assaulted. paying people more isnt working.
finally the fed and the gov arent helping. the looming threat of regular petulant government shutdowns coupled with states that refuse to in many cases even acknowledge their covid numbers, is butting against Federal reserve dogma that laughably insists somehow this is just "transient" inflation and its just going to go away, despite the first decline ever in cyber monday sales on record.
the silver lining analysts all rally around is a trillion dollar stimulus bill just that wasnt even submitted to the house until nine months into the year that will arrive just in time for a 2022 meldown over what are widely anticipated to be poor christmas sales amid a driver shortage, shipping gridlock, and chip shortage.
to see the BLS flog capital intensity platitudes and labor composition functions is just bad comedy. its the same sort of bureaucratic blinders we had right up to 2008.
An example of why this is relevant: https://www.investing.com/indices/zimbabwe-industrial