I can’t help but think of recent headlines regarding the apparent drop in worker productivity over the past year or so—-most suggest that economists are struggling to understand the cause. Yeah, it’s a gd mystery. Why aren’t people motivated to be “successful”.
With my current job, I explicitly went from a full stack dev to a front end dev to shed responsibility in certain areas, because if I'm allowed to see the whole picture, I'm going to try and fix the full picture.
It's not clear that people are actually being paid more after inflation, but assuming they were...
No.
If workers are getting more and producing the same, how can their productivity not go down?
Productivity = output per unit of input, according to some measure for output and input. For example, output = GDP, input = total hours worked.
And in theory, the output is equal to one's income, or the value added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product (Production approach vs Income approach)