Trying to figure out how that would work with services rather than products.  If those are included, it must be based on total sales revenue.  So in a recession, unless people get laid off on a pretty strict ratio to falling sales volume (which only some companies are stupid enough to do), overall productivity must ordinarily go down, no?

It's a stupid word, since it has strong overtones of virtue to it (or exploitation).  Ah, but silly me, it's an implacable capitalist economic term so those values have no part in the calculations.

And French workers, for example, presumably have lower "productivity" than Americans, but not because they don't work just as hard or effectively but because French society has decided people deserve long vacations and shorter work weeks.

Does anybody calculate the wasted, unused potential productivity of the unemployed?  On that score, places like France would do vastly better than the U.S. in a normal economy.

Just musing here, but the more I think about it, the more the very statistic reeks of the human meat grinder.

Fascinating article in the NYTimes the other day about how language affects thinking.  Seems to me the very language of capitalist economics reflects and maintains an inhuman attitutude towards us cogs in the machine. (cf the BP chair's concern for "the little people")