This is a good question, and I actually don't know the way they calculate this exactly (except what my sibling said about GDP vs workforce). What I can point ou

This is a good question, and I actually don't know the way they calculate this exactly (except what my sibling said about GDP vs workforce). What I can point out is something in your analogy that I think generalizes, and demonstrates part of the issue: Realistically, across an entire company or economy you're going to hire a lot more 1-inch paint brush people to paint your rooms. So instead of having a dude with a roller doing it alone, you have 2 or 3 people with brushes, maybe working in shifts to get it done. It's obviously more efficient to use the one guy with the roller, but what if he gets sick? It used to be that Alice, Bob and Candice were all working together. Alice could cover for Bob if Bob got sick or needed to bring his kid to the dentist. Now it's all Steve, and Steve feels the pressure to GET SHIT DONE, because there's no one else to do it. He'll work while sick, his kid won't make it to the dentist. So sure he's more productive. But back in the day, with the shift work, even if the naive calculation indicates that input effort per employee was the same, you have these soft factors that made quality of life way higher. And that's without even getting into cost of living/inflation stuff, nevermind student debt. People are hurting out there.