this assumes that:
- all workers are 'producing' anything.
- all workers are serving real needs.
- the difference between supply and demand is really so low that any dip in 'productivity' would harm anything more than an executive's RoI.
- that the threat of this financial 'harm' necessitates more work.
with the increase in 'productivity' over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it's 'unsold' or would drive down prices: we wouldn't need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.
what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn't view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?
why 'productivity' specifically? why not GDP? or GPI? or SPI? or HDI? or HPI? or GBMI (Goodhart's Bad Metric Index)?
you're right that this character wouldn't be part of a 'solution', under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.