I think it actually does, but only the part of productivity that can be bought and sold. Which is not all of it, but it is a really big part.

A lot of critiques by laypersons (I haven’t read any by serious economists yet, but Marx’s “Capital” is on my list, if I can manage to understand it!) of capitalism and markets that I’ve seen seem to me to ignore or misleadingly downplay the plain fact that prices (including the wages of labor) are not just some oppressive conspiracy by The Man: they represent human desire, and not just that of the rich and privileged. Why should that desire not be fulfilled? Yes, there are lots of things we value that can’t be bought and sold: love and friendship are some easy examples. But on the other hand there’s a huge quantity of things we value (not just that we are told to value, but that we actually value) that CAN be bought and sold, and the system of free-floating prices that we live in makes those things more and more readily available to us, because it motivates other people to produce them. And those things, the buyable and sellable, might not just be the obvious like bread, beer, houses, and iPods. Creativity, or the exercise thereof, can also be motivated or enabled by market forces. This is why we buy recorded music even when we could just download it for free, isn’t it? You want to support the musicians whose music you like. In other words, you send them a market signal that their creativity is desired by other people, and thereby enable them to pursue it without sacrificing their most pressing needs like food and shelter.

It’s true that this system often fails to offer us what we want, and that it often traps us in situations we find unpleasant, like having a job you hate. But hang on, maybe that job isn’t as meaningless as it seems. Consider the indirect implications of the fact that somebody is willing to pay you to do it.

-Andy