Labour ‘productivity’ is always a massively misleading statistic because of protectionism and inflation as well as currency fluctuations and government spending.
It’s just pretty much GDP divided by total hours worked.
GDP is a factor of price and output.
So all things other being equal, having massively inflated prices and costs will yield higher ‘productivity’, which is a nonsense.
US labour productivity numbers are massively skewed by the 1%ers and the move away from actual physical production. A New York lawyer having a thousand dollar ‘working’ lunch with a client is being as ‘productive’ as dozens of Chinese engineers and software developers by that definition. Jeff Bezos sitting on the toilet is more ‘productive’ than thousands of workers.
At the macro level, the US government borrowing trillions to pay federal workers and fund pork barrel and gravy train projects are massively jacking up ‘productivity’.
Just because the US government pays many times as the Chinese government for warships and fighters does not mean they are getting many times as capable warships and fighters.
Productivity, like all economic figures and indicators, relies on basic economic assumptions working to remain true. Unattainable pre-requisites like perfect competition and perfect knowledge.
In the economics theory world, if two companies are making the same product but one charges more than the other, the cheaper company would get all the demand and the dearer one none.
That is the basis for ‘productivity’ assumptions, that if products are not worth the asking price, nobody would buy them and the company would need to lower prices to the ‘fair’ market rate or go bust.
But real world economics don’t work that way, which is why only those who do not understand the economics or wish to deceive takes things like economic productivity figures seriously.
After all, if America was so much more productive than China, why isn’t America the workshop of the world? The reality is that economics ‘productivity’ often have an inverse relationship to actual real world productivity. If you can make the same thing cheaper, you actually have lower economic productivity.
