It seems clear that if you achieve increased productivity by ensuring that 90% of the population worked, say, 60 hours a week, with no maternity leave or PTO, no large amount of time to spend outdoors or with loved ones, you could have a productive economy full of miserable people. You can have scenarios where the quality of life is very high for 10% of the people while it is very low for the vast majority.

> It's very hard for a country with half the per capita productivity of another country to match their quality of life.

A very easy thing to say, but unsupported by the facts. According to Wikipedia [1] the GDP per Capita for the USA is roughly double that of France ($80k vs $43k) but according to happiness index levels[2], France is at 97% the happiness of the USA.

Notably France’s culture focuses on time with people, which is free and makes people very happy.

Certainly productivity matters to a point. You can’t be happy if you can’t even eat. But beyond a certain point, grinding for additional productivity, especially when the gains are not going to those workers, does not increase happiness. And in fact it is clear that you can have half the GDP per capita and be just as happy.

I should note that “GDP Is Not a Measure of Human Well-Being” is such a well discussed topic that it is easy to find articles on this point [3] and Wikipedia has a section on this fact. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[2] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/

[3] https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-b...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product?wprov=s...