Thank you for pointing that out. It's an easy mistake to make given how very often one can see that terrible disease, "Overworkitis," on death certificates... /s
Not to be too cynical, but I wonder what the result would look like if they were able to do the math all the way. It seems like they can tell us how many people die early from heart disease due in part to overwork, but we don't know how the value provided by their work extended the lives of others. For example, if overwork created a higher GDP, which resulted in better nutrition, medical outcomes, etc. maybe the net effect of overwork is positive. (Now that I think about it, that could get very dark if we embraced the idea, though.)
You'd probably also find some who's early demise would be considered socially beneficial. However, I think it would be hard to know good or bad impacts without extreme and obvious examples. We've also had heroes who looked to be doing a lot of good throughout their life, only to turn out to be monsters behind closed doors.
Also something like GDP is very macro, and not all GDP activity is socially beneficial, so GDP contribution would be a flawed way to make such an assessment. For example, someone scamming seniors out of their retirement money through shady business tactics wouldn't be a net positive to society, but could contribute millions to GDP.
That would be interesting to see. I for one have no real idea what the result would be.
My $0.02 based on nothing more than personal experience is that it seems to be a net negative in practice. I'm sure that some degree of overwork in certain industries has raised GDP, but there are also notorious examples of systemic overwork reducing productivity, like medical providers (mistakes) and Japan (Parkinson's Law), which seem to resonate more with my experience.
Who knows, though? It could easily be the opposite, for all I know. It would be interesting if someone was able to do this analysis.
Thank you for pointing that out. It's an easy mistake to make given how very often one can see that terrible disease, "Overworkitis," on death certificates... /s