[usrusr]

My pet thought experiment for these questions is the luxury watch maker: the magic of brand gets them incredible amounts of "productivity" from working slow.

Now imagine some major policy mistakes that make all other economic activity fail. Average productivity would rise madly! And everybody would ask themselves, how can we have so much unemployment, when we have this totally awesome productivity? You can almost hear the knives getting whetted against foreign and domestic scapegoats, because clearly, with that awesome productivity inherent to "us" (people love thinking that!) , only foul play can be the explanation.