It might be that we're spending the increased productivity on temporary things rather than long-lived things. For example, spending $1M on keeping a retired ca

It might be that we're spending the increased productivity on temporary things rather than long-lived things. For example, spending $1M on keeping a retired cancer patient alive. That's good for them, good for their family, good for lots of people to feel like they'll have a chance of survival if they get it, but it doesn't cause a new bridge to be built, etc. The technology improves, the knowledge improves, but those things aren't visible on a skyline. It might also be things like higher quality food, varieties of food, yachts for the rich that most of us don't ever see, or things like that, things that are either consumed and don't accumulate wealth, or things that are relatively long lived and durable but not part of most people's lives because most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. Other ideas: paper pushing services like handling unnecessarily large volumes of litigation just to run a business, which requires work and causes GDP to go up but doesn't produce actual products.