Productivity
(1) What you get back from a task for the work you put into it. That is: input × productivity = output.
Input usually refers to labour, but it could equally well be capital, land, or energy. Or environmental impact (eco-efficiency). For example, the labour-productivity of industrial agriculture is high; its land-productivity is not so high; its energy-productivity is low.
(2) The extent to which a system produces interesting, diverse, life-enhancing results: friendships, trust, inventiveness, the arts, social and cultural capital.
Productivity can be seen and admired in a rock pool, with its variety of species, events and politics; or in a creative civilisation; or in an imaginative mind. Like the “potential” developed in the adaptive cycle (Wheel of Life), productivity is enriched by connections and complexity, but only up to a point, beyond which the connections themselves produce rigidity and destroy it.
Related entries:
Appropriate Technology, Leisure.
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