Wealth created is still the same, and that's what an economist means by "productive" - you produced X amount of wealth (usually measured in dollar amounts). It

Wealth created is still the same, and that's what an economist means by "productive" - you produced X amount of wealth (usually measured in dollar amounts). It's like "work" meaning one thing to a normal person, but something very specific and counterintuitive in Newtonian physics (if you carry a fifty-pound weight in a circle and stop at your starting point, you've done no work).