I don't actually think your second point is correct on either a historical or practical level. Historically, humans had a lot of what would now be considered downtime, especially in certain societies. And practically, nothing actually "requires" that except for the fact that we've set up society in such a way to allow some people get to grow wildly wealthy on the backs on the labor of most of the people putting in that actual work. That's the result of a series of choices, and could absolutely be changed. Nothing "required" about it.
Even in recent history my experience in countries that haven't caught up with the 'productive' Western-Europe approach contain a lot of downtime. The experience was often annoying for us Northern-Europeans, but in hindsight seemed moderately healthier to me.
It involved a bunch of guys standing around on construction sites sort of getting stuff done, but mostly when the owner was present, and enjoying their time outside part of the time when the owner was not.
Or women spending easily 50% of their time in their shops not selling things but chatting with various other women, or watching their kids.
I wasn't a fan of the clear gender-separation, but it was interesting to see that both men and women spent much of their day interacting in personally meaningful ways with their neighbors/customers, rather than bleeping products as fast as they could to hit some kind of target.
Fun fact: if you took all the income in the U.S. (labor + capital) and distributed it evenly, every adult person would make about $65,000. Quite comfortable, and maybe a big improvement on the status quo, but still "working stiff" territory. We still live in an era where America's protestant work ethic is relevant. Maybe that'll change decades from now, but we're still quite a ways away from being in a post-scarcity society.
The OP suggested that people could work a lot less if our system wasn’t designed for making some people rich. But folks makin $65k still work eight hours a day, often more. People who can make $65k almost invariably choose to increase consumption rather than decrease hours and income. Our economy doesn’t have so much excess in it going to rich people that we could have both the consumption we want and also work a lot less.
Depends what you mean by post-scarcity. For example, if supermarkets weren't as interested in profit, they might choose a lower price point which would allow them to sell "ugly" produce. I've seen many different estimates of how much produce is discarded for ugliness, but all indicate a large portion.
The knock-on effects of profit-seeking are large. And not all bad, of course.
Its really astonishing to me how wealthy some people are getting from others work. I completely support people getting wildly rich from their own efforts, but from the way that our society is structured, most wealth is just capturing the value of another persons labor.
Classic example being to take on $100k of debt to start a business and then paying workers $20/hour. Only one person is on the hook for $100k and they are rewarded accordingly if it pays off.
It's easy for the workers to then conspire about how unfair it is that the debtor isn't out there in the sun like them, but that's not a very complete picture of reality. Zero risk is part of the workers' compensation.
There have been centuries of philosophical debate on this subject. I don't think anyone who seriously looks at the topic is leaving out risk.
The argument (outside of Marxist circles) is more to do with whether business owners are being overcompensated because owners are able to exploit the market failures of the labor market--information asymmetry, power imbalances, quasi monopsony positions, government assistance for low paid employees etc...
There are also arguments about whether owners are being overprotected from risks by relatively recent concepts like limited liability (and more direct forms of corporate welfare), and arguments that workers aren't really in a zero risk position.
Even more suspicious or chore-seeming to those that are more productive during the evening, which studies recently suggest this could be how some of us are wired. There's this, I think Anglo-Saxon fixation on early mornings being where productive and good people do things.
Maybe a cultural byproduct of regions of the world with short, dark winter days?
That's me. I'm brain-dead in the mornings no matter how much sleep I have gotten. I'm extremely alert in the evenings. The evenings are definitely when I do my best thinking and best work.
>early mornings being where productive and good people do things
If everyone demands that you start work at 8:00 sharp, those who are at their best at 5:00pm will actually be worse at everything, all else equal, than those who are at their best at 8:00.
One of the benefits I find with coming back from trips to Europe returning to the US East Coast is there's about a week where I'm tending to get up by 5AM or so. I slip back to a normal schedule but I really feel good getting a bunch of work done by 9AM or so. Can't really keep it up sans jetlag though.
It’s a really great feeling. I went for a while getting up at 5:00am, going to the gym, then straight to work by 7 or so. I’d often get the most important work of the day done by 10 and I felt pretty amazing. But having to go to sleep by 10 (which means in bed by 9:30) was too hard to adhere to.
I think people might not be recording their sleeping times accurately in the time use survey they used because there is a cultural desire to be seen as an early riser.