I hate graphs like this. The reason being that the scales are incommensurate. The one on the right (red) starts at zero and the data has nearly a factor of 10 change. The left (blue) scale doesn't start at zero and the data changes less than a factor of 10. I much prefer the normalized one that I saw somewhere (I think upthread).
True, but if you level all scaling il still means (if we can believe the source, no idea what that source is...) that, since the mid-70's, employment would have been reduced by 40%, while production would have climbed 35% during the same period.
Consumption, obviously, will have more than exponentially climbed as well.
I suppose there is, somewhere, a limit to consumption compensating for productivity growth: perhaps tomorrow consumption may still offset that rise of productivity, when every Chinese of African family will have the opportunity to buy a colour TV, four smartphones, ànd a Tesla (note that that evolution of consumption may still take a few decennia, and would obviously be good for the whole world, and in first instance for the third world...), but ultimately there is probably no market for all families on Earth buying 17 television sets, seven Tesla's, or three smartphones for each family member. And then there will be a tendency to the four-day working week, the three-day working week, etc. And/or a basic minimum income (which perhaps would also make sense today, independently of growth of productivity, as a straightforward form of social security, but that's another question - Finland is experimenting with it, I invite OP and others who are interested to look into that).
For this evolution of consumption sustaining rise of productiveness to be long-term, we need to make Africa/China/etc. "great again". The U.S., after WWII, had that very intelligent reflex of wanting to immediately make Europe and Japan "great again", so that Europe and Japan could become consumers of U.S. products. I'm quite sure the Marshall Plan (the U.S. pumping money into the economies of the countries which had
lost the war - instead of bleeding such countries, as had always been the custom before WWII) was the best idea ever in "making America great again". If, tomorrow, the U.S. and Europe become obsessed with protecting their home markets/employment, and literrally and figuratively building walls "against" other economies, then obviously global consumption will not rise and hence not be able to offset the rise in U.S. or European productivity, and instead of creating new Chinese or African consumers to sustain our employment, we will simply have our employment taken over by robots, without new consumers.
Politicians in both Europe and the U.S. should probably have the courage to explain to their voters that we should actually be encouraging jobs in China and Africa to enrich them, and that today that is probably the best remedy against the surge of robotic productivity in the U.S. and Europe. I am not optimistic, however.
EDIT: for example, there are now around 2 billion smartphones in the world. That leaves another 5 billion potential consumers...
