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Is this definition flawed in the age where software can sometimes replace an entire profession? In such cases, can "productivity" sometimes fall in the face of

• Eridrus 9y ago
  It's tricky to predict what would happen to a statistic that measures the entire economy. At a first approximation all the money going to that profession would be removed from GDP, but so would result in productivity losses if we automated industries with higher than average "productivity". However, someone is doing the automating - are those people even more productive over the course of a year? Maybe, or maybe not and there's just a lot of investment that will bear fruit over the long run. But some amount of money is still being spent on the service, and the set of workers has gone down, so this would probably pull the number back up, but by how much? But that money isn't gone, it remains in someone's pocket, rather than disappearing, and the price of some good has fallen. Does this cause people to buy more of the good or some other good? If they buy more of some other good that has low "productivity", such as food and drinks, then that would pull productivity down. It would be hard to argue that such an outcome is unilaterally good though; we would hope that in the long run people find other high "productivity" activities, but whether we actually will is uncertain.