A century ago, industrialists measured economic virility by tonnes of coal hewn per shift. Today Canberra’s spreadsheets obsess over “GDP per hour worked”.

Yet the richer Australia grows, the more hours seem to vanish into work we quietly suspect is pointless. Surveys for David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs suggest 40% of employees believe their job would not be missed if it evaporated overnight. The OECD, prodded by scholars such as Tim Jackson, now concedes that barely a third of all paid effort makes any durable contribution to health, happiness or ecological security. The rest is neutral (an ocean of compliance emails), parasitic (high‑frequency traders skimming micro‑seconds) or openly harmful (junk food, carbon exports, algorithmic dopamine‑loops).

In a piece in ANU’s _Policy Forum_ I dubbed this dilemma “the work sweet spot”. Too little employment and we languish; too much of the wrong sort and we fray. The real policy trick, then, is not squeezing ever more widgets from tired fingers but channelling labour, capital and ingenuity towards activities that unequivocally enlarge human flourishing.

From tonnes of coal to well-being per resource‑hour

Call the new metric inclusive productivity: wellbeing produced per unit of labour, capital and natural resources, weighted towards the least‑advantaged and a liveable climate. It asks three questions.

1. Can hours be pulled from low‑yield drudgery into high‑impact care, education, green tech and creative purpose?
2. Will the economy stay resilient when shocks strike, or will skills be trapped in sunset industries?
3. Does the tax system recycle economic rent and ecological damage into investment that matters?

The haircut Australia needs

OECD input-output tables hint at a simple map. Roughly a fifth of the labour market — hospitals, schools, aged‑care, clean water — drives the lion’s share of long‑run welfare. Another tenth — basic food and shelter — keeps society ticking, footprint notwithstanding. Everything else drifts into varying shades of grey or red. The policy mission is equally stark: expand the bright green slice, quarantine or close the blood‑red, and give the greys a hard shove toward usefulness.

That requires four shifts.

1. Human‑capital for the AI age

Estonia’s “open training accounts” let adults cash vouchers for stackable micro‑credentials whenever an algorithm eats their old role; Australia should copy. Digital literacy from primary school will ensure tomorrow’s workforce can audit — not merely use — AI. Meanwhile, soft-drink taxes, universal dental coverage and walkable suburbs add many more healthy hours to the labour pool than propping up declining smokestack clusters.

Cash helps too. Randomised trials from Kenya to the Bronx demonstrate that unconditional transfers to poor families raise school completion and lifetime earnings; they move children out of survival labour and into capability building – the ultimate productivity hack.

2. Tough love for negative sectors

• Ultra‑processed food – tiered sugar levies, front‑of‑pack labels and a ban on junk ads in schools saved Mexico an estimated 40, 000 diabetes cases a year; the same could shave billions off Medicare projections. Some savings could be used to assist sugar cane farmers into other crops.
• Gambling and alcohol – minimum‑unit pricing and mandatory pre‑commitment cards would cut addiction and hospital nights, releasing hospitality labour for experiences that enrich social capital.
• Excess fossil fuels – border‑carbon tariffs and auctioned decline quotas protect climate “natural capital” and funnel engineers towards renewables, already more labour‑intensive per terawatt‑hour.
• High‑frequency trading – a 0.1 % financial‑transaction tax plus a rule that orders must rest 250 milliseconds would neuter the 95 % of millisecond churn that, McKinsey says, adds no price information. Freed quants might pivot to such things as health‑tech or cyclone modelling – fields that actually matter.
• Tobacco – New Zealand‑style generational bans could end a fully negative value chain.

Workers displaced by such sunsets deserve flexicurity bridges **—**portable redundancy accounts, wage insurance during reskilling, regional just‑transition deals — so the shift feels like opportunity, not punishment.

3. Competition powered by consumer protection

Harvard’s Michael Porter warned that without “tough product and safety standards companies face little pressure to upgrade productivity”. Australia proved him right. The Productivity Commission’s 2008 review of consumer law predicted a $4 billion annual dividend; Treasury’s follow‑up found appliance prices fell 12 % relative to the CPI and injury hospitalisations dropped. Good rules do not strangle enterprise – they force it to compete on real cost and quality rather than on opacity.

The implementation of open banking application programming interfaces, mandated unit-price labels, and data-portability requirements would significantly reduce search costs, while defaulting to best-offer options would facilitate seamless switching for consumers. Empowered buyers act as roving auditors, redeploying capital towards suppliers who lift welfare.

4. Fiscal plumbing that favours real investment

Scrapping stamp duty for an annual land‑value levy captures rent and frees mobility. An allowance for corporate equity neutralises the tax bias to debt, nudging firms to fund innovation rather than buy‑backs. A resource‑rent tax, paired with a carbon price that pays dividends to citizens, skims windfalls while accelerating the clean-tech frontier.

Measuring what matters

The OECD already pilots a productivity‑times‑well-being index; statisticians can easily publish a “functional‑work ratio” (share of labour hours in sectors with positive social return) and a natural‑capital‑adjusted growth rate. Publish, and politicians will chase the scoreboard.

The rhetoric is ready

“The test of every economic reform,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers told Parliament, “is whether it boosts productivity and broad‑based wellbeing.” Andrew Leigh calls competition policy “health and cost‑of‑living rolled into one”. Even the prime minister speaks of “inclusive growth”. So let the roundtable be more than talk.

The real productivity revolution is not another decimal place on GDP. It is the act of asking, of every working hour: does this raise net well-being — especially for the worst‑off — without overdrawing Earth’s bank account? If not, re‑deploy the hour; if yes, amplify. That, not a bigger treadmill, is the prosperity frontier worth chasing.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.