Well… that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.
Oh yeah? Industrial farming gives less food per hour of work than collecting wild nuts? Are you sure about that?
Please do show me the data that 8 billion people can survive on hunting and gathering.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers “worked”.
They didn’t say we could.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn’t change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren’t decreasing work loads for some reason
Also, people tend not to die from infections anymore, or starvation (usually). One bad famine doesn’t wipe out everyone you know. The vast majority of babies survive to old age and only extremely rarely does a mother die in childbirth.
And the entire population of earth doesn’t live around areas where you can forage anymore.
Little things like that
Okay, so how about medieval peasants also working 7-8 hour days, ~150 days per year?
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html