Where does productivity collide?

The ratio of the output an economy or firm produces to the inputs it uses, such as output per hour of labor, or the broader total factor productivity that captures how much output comes from a given bundle of labor and capital together. Solow's 1957 Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function showed how to separate growth caused by adding more inputs from growth caused by producing more from the same inputs, and treated that residual as a measure of technical progress. Here the referent is an efficiency ratio for a human economy, the thing behind long-run living standards and debates over the productivity slowdown, not a rate of biomass growth in an ecosystem or a grammar's capacity to coin new words.[1]

Unit

Output divided by input, for example dollars of value added per hour worked

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Computed as output per labor hour, or as a total factor productivity residual from a fitted production function using national or firm accounts

The rate at which producers such as plants and algae capture energy and build it into new organic matter, reported as gross primary production for all the carbon fixed and as net primary production for what remains after the producers' own respiration. Field, Behrenfeld, Randerson, and Falkowski's 1998 Primary Production of the Biosphere combined land and ocean models to estimate global net primary production at about 105 petagrams of carbon per year, split roughly evenly between the two. Here the referent is an energy flux that feeds every food web on Earth, measured in carbon fixed per area per year, not an economy's efficiency ratio or a rule's ability to form new words.[2]

Unit

Carbon or biomass fixed per unit area per unit time, for example grams of carbon per square metre per year

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated from plant growth harvests, gas exchange of carbon dioxide, and satellite models of light captured by vegetation and phytoplankton

The degree to which a grammatical process, such as an affix, can be extended freely to build genuinely new words: the English suffix -ness is highly productive, attaching to almost any adjective, while other patterns are frozen and coin nothing new. Baayen and Lieber's 1991 Productivity and English derivation turned this into a corpus-based measure, using how often a pattern appears in words seen only once to gauge how live it still is. Here the referent is a grammar's generative reach, a property of a linguistic rule counted over a vocabulary, not an economy's output ratio or an ecosystem's rate of biomass production.[3]

Unit

A word-forming pattern's openness, scaled by how readily it yields new coinings

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified from a corpus by counting the words a pattern forms and the share of them that occur only once, following Baayen's measures