How is it that, 200 or so years after the industrial revolution, there still is no consensus on the best way to measure labor/productivity? In software we spend a lot of time arguing over the best way to measure productivity and manage people to maximize it, but everything we do seems to come down to ideological adherence to systems of thought like SCRUM, or heuristics meant to approximate agile development without having to hire a SCRUM master. I would think that there would be some kind of economist who wrote the undisputed official textbook of measurement of productivity
Productivity is calculated as a ratio value_produced / value_consumed. The latter, in software world, is a sum of all benefits, salaries, technology used to produce value, etc.
What is missing in the current software world is the way of calculating the value produced.
But the whole point of storypoints is allow forecast estimates to be made without giving a date estimate to management!
That's right. And story points work: base your estimate on your previous experience with the known task sizes and loads.