It's not nearly every unproductive person's fault that they're unproductive. There's a lot of useful work to be done and a lot of people capable of doing it who are not currently aligned. It's often a matter of inefficiency in capital allocation, i.e. lack of funding for certain useful work because it's not easy or practical (without intervention, like from the government) to earn a profit doing it. There's also limitations on our ability to coordinate work, regardless of funding.
Profitability is a mediocre proxy for the usefulness of work, and so we have only a mediocre ability to allocate labor usefully in our profit driven economy. Some of the best investments of money and labor in terms of profitability are even things I would call counterproductive.
They don't want status like the smart and productive people, they want status like the rich.
Propaganda equating these two groups is a very popular thing for the rich to do with their money. Some would say that's unproductive, others would say it's smart (as long as they're the only smart person doing it, once a bunch of the smart people start playing unproductive games to work the system things get worse for everyone).
Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.