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Notes -
sorry
but! I don't quite understand. what's an example of an increase in material productivity that's not an increase in utility?
They are increasing functions with respect to each other, but the effect is nonlinear. That is, if you make twice as many pizzas, people will generally be more happy, but less than twice as happy. You can only physically eat so much pizza, you only like pizza so much, and there are a bunch of things you care about that aren't food.
So first, let's construct scenarios where material productivity increases but utility decreases utility, starting with unambiguous but somewhat contrived and trivial ways that form a proof by example, and gradually transition into more sophisticated but debatable examples
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to customers, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and shunts them off to a warehouse to rot. (Utility is derived via consumption, not production)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to hungry poor people, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and sends them all to the penthouse suite of a single really fat rich person who eats them all himself. (Utility per pizza is higher the fewer you already have)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 11 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Total output has gone up, but the cost has gone up more, so efficiency is lower)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 80 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours every single day, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Pizza:labor efficiency is equal, but TIME also has nonlinear utility, so the quality of life for the worker has decreased even if he gets paid 8 times as much)
-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, VS A bakery that produces pizzas with literally no labor or ingredient cost, but the pizzas somehow mess with their consumer's brains such that they to lose the ability to experience happiness ever again. (Obviously the most contrived example, but hopefully clearly pointing out the distinction).
The point being, that although all else being equal, more material production on its own is strictly superior to less material production for the same costs, all else is rarely equal. Therefore, increases in material production should be correlated with but distinct from actual utility. The biggest counterexample is the industrial revolution. Material production has, in reality, increased 100x. The wellbeing and happiness and prosperity of people has not increased 100x. It's gone up, for sure. But some things have gotten worse to compensate, and most things just have improved by less than a factor of 100x. The amount of joy you get from looking at art is less than a hundred times better than it was in the past. The enjoyability of food is less than a hundred times better. The amount of value you get from socialization is less than a hundred times more. Oh sure, you have access to a hundred times as much art, or food, or social connections via the internet, but you can't actually convert that into internal value, utility, at anywhere near perfect efficiency because you have bottlenecks based on time and biology and psychology. This is why Bill Gates isn't running around being thousands of times happier than everyone else: it doesn't work that way.
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