Productivity Is a Story We Tell to Keep the Pyramid Standing
We talk about productivity as if it were a neutral fact — a technical measure, an economic truth, a simple reflection of how much value someone creates. It isn’t.
Productivity is a story. And like most powerful stories, it tells us more about who we are trying to protect than what we are trying to measure.
The Conflict That Never Ended
Modern politics has been shaped, for over two centuries, by the same basic conflict: capital versus labor. Who owns assets. Who sells time. Who absorbs risk. Who gets to rest.
Despite enormous cultural and technological change, that cleavage has never disappeared. What has changed is the sophistication of the language we use to obscure it. As economies shifted away from visible factory labor toward service and knowledge work, we told ourselves the old categories no longer applied. We talked about “post-material values.” We created professional classes that felt insulated from the blunt force of survival. But the structure didn’t dissolve. It just became harder to see.
When Labor Feels Like Capital
Knowledge work creates a powerful illusion. If you work with ideas instead of bodies, symbols instead of tools, screens instead of soil, it can feel like you’ve escaped labor altogether. Autonomy masquerades as ownership. Flexibility masquerades as freedom.
But knowledge workers still sell time. They still depend on wages. They still collapse under market shocks. And when conditions change, their proximity to capital vanishes very quickly. They are not capital. They are labor with better lighting. This distinction matters — because the system relies on their belief that they are closer to ownership than they actually are.
Productivity Without Bodies
From a sociological perspective, productivity is a deeply incomplete concept. It measures output while pretending bodies don’t exist.
It ignores:
caregiving
recovery
emotional labor
learning curves
coordination costs
chronic illness
aging
fear
It assumes that time is infinitely compressible and humans are infinitely adaptable. That assumption is not accidental. It allows the system to extract more while appearing rational, even humane. If exhaustion is framed as inefficiency, then suffering becomes a personal failure rather than a structural signal.
The Material Reality We Pretend Is Optional
Every human experiences the world materially first.
Before meaning, identity, or ambition, there is:
hunger
fatigue
pain
dependence
care
Productivity metrics do not begin here. They begin after survival is assumed, after someone else has absorbed the cost of making a worker “ready” to produce.
That cost is usually hidden:
inside families
inside women’s labor
inside debt
inside bodies
When productivity rises while people burn out, it is not a success. It is a transfer.
Why the Pyramid Still Holds
Productivity survives because it does important political work. It justifies inequality as efficiency. It explains precarity as discipline. It reframes extraction as optimization. Most importantly, it allows the system to make selective concessions; improving conditions for just enough people to prevent collapse, without ever questioning the foundation.
Knowledge workers get flexibility. Managers get autonomy. Platforms get scale. The pyramid remains intact.
A Different Measure
If we measured productivity from a human baseline instead — starting with:
bodily limits
caregiving requirements
time to recover
the need for meaning and safety
many of our “efficient” systems would look wildly irrational. Work would be organized differently. Care would be treated as infrastructure. Rest would be a design constraint, not a reward. The fact that this sounds radical tells us how far we’ve drifted from reality.
The Question We Avoid
The real question isn’t whether productivity can be measured better. It’s whether we are willing to redesign systems that depend on pretending humans are machines, as long as the pyramid keeps standing. We know how to produce enough. What we haven’t decided is whether human well-being is the point.
