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"Here's a counterexample: The 1920's saw very significant increases in productivity as the result of electrification, but the result was the Great Depression."

The premise of your example is flawed.

Look, I walk outside early every morning, and every morning the sun rises. By your logic above (of first electrification and then Depression), my walking outside every day makes the Sun rise because one follows the other. Yet clearly that's not the case.

Productivity is always a plus for the macro, sometimes a short-term minus for the micro.

Adding electricity did not create poor farming techniques that contributed to the Dust Bowl weather catastrophies. Adding electricity did not cause the Fed to tighten credit or the Congress to raise taxes or the French to dump their Gold reserves, much less indebt Europe in post-war poverty and massive death as a result of a useless war that they hoisted upon the world.

The premise of your objection is flawed.

At any point in history you care to examine, there are always many events, conditions, processes and phenomena occurring, many of which will be blamed (or credited) by one theorist or another with causing subsequent changes to economies, markets, societies, cultures and political alignments.

Consequently, just as you can claim that the Great Depression happened for other reasons, and in spite of the rising productivity resulting from electrification, I can just as easily claim that another Great Depression is coming soon to a world near you, in spite of rising productivity.

I can also claim that rising productivity may be detrimental in some circumstances (but clearly not in all circumstances), because there are multiple cases in the historical record of bad economies following periods of rising productivity.

Capacity utilization is falling. Sales are declining. Businesses have no pricing power. The car manufacturers have to offer zero percent financing, with no payments for a year, and an 8-year loan, in order to sell new cars. In such an environment, the economy needs greater productivity about as much as an overweight person needs to eat more calories per day.

Look, when capacity utilization is this low, the cheapest way to increase production is simply to use more of the existing, but idle, capacity. In fact, the major reason that the productivity numbers are increasing is precisely because of the decreased capacity utilization: it's the high-cost production facilities (and producers) that get shut down first. The least-productive employees who get laid off first. The worst-managed businesses who go bankrupt first. That's what's behind your increase in productivity.

Finally, the core point I wish to make is not that the increased productivity in the 1920's was causative, either partially or wholly, of the Great Depression. My contention is that a) the Great Depression happened immediately after a period of significantly rising productivity, and b) it makes sense that the economic dislocations that resulted from replacing human labor with electric motors would, initially, cause economic hardship. People do not instantly adjust to changes in the job market of that magnitude. Nevertheless, there is no scientifically-accepted way to quantify the significance of this effect (if it exists), relative to whatever other factors may also have caused the Great Depression.

Bottom line: rising productivity does not reliably prevent subsequent recessions and depressions, and may even contribute to them.