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You don't have to imagine. You can do a real cultural economic comparison to other countries:
Italy, Greece, Russia, Spain (and others) are countries that index more on your proposed value system: socialization, family, quality of life over hard work. China, Japan and the US index very highly on the productivity side of the spectrum, China probably significantly more than the US. Some of those QOL-indexing countries also have high unemployment rates and relatively lower GDP per capita. Unemployment + GDP are probably the wrong things to optimize for. Personally I believe Unemployment is overloaded as our optimization function for economic health, where median wage increase is more representative of livability. One question I have (and genuinely can't guess at): if you are unemployed in Greece, on average, what exactly is your quality of life? All that said, there are countries that strike a healthier balance with strong economies: Germany, Canada, UK. Zooming way out, my take on productivity generally is: human pressure to push our productivity is inevitable because we still need to solve some very hard, expensive problems:
(1) Our history of industrialization has led to
unsustainable environmental impact. This may require 10-100x the engineering focus & coordination we've ever had before.
(2) Disease still has significant impact.
(3) We still need human labor to harvest and transform resources (agriculture, metals)
(4) We still need human labor to generate more "life necessities" supply: electricity, housing, water / plumbing. One could argue that for (3) & (4) we can be more like Germany and we'll still do great. Also one could argue that if we increased taxes / shifted government spend to subsidize housing development (vs. home ownership) we might also be fine. Edits: grammar |
This is likely well known, it'd just be awful if the official measure of QOL put pressure on employers to raise wages. Better to measure something more abstractly valuable.