Not quite: the workweek described still sounds like at least 40 hours. What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during t

Not quite: the workweek described still sounds like at least 40 hours. What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during the early/middle years of the industrial revolution. Modern day capitalism, while significantly flawed, seems to have moved on from that early horror: I have ancestors from ~100 years ago that died of black lung after spending decades of 60-70 hours/week in coal mines. The author also ignores the time outside of "work" necessary to keep a household going. Time spent outside of the fields wasn't just idle time: everything from cooking to home maintenance was added labor that would eat away at those off hours more so than similar tasks today. And sure, today some people still have no choice but to work long hours, and some people choose to do so, but I imagine that was the case in the supposedly more idyllic workers' environment described by the author as well. Other aspects of these claims of a more leisurely life are refuted here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/medieval-peasants-really-did-not-work-only-150-days-a-year%3fformat=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulati... We also shouldn't forget the conditions of work & life for the average person. Peasantry was certainly a big step above out & out slavery but freedom was still significantly curtailed. There was not for example universal freedom of movement. Absent approval by the local lord, a person was bound to the land they were born on. The quality of low/middle justice for what rights people did have was highly variable & subject to capricious whims at times. (Which isn't to say that's a completely solved problem today though) All of which is to say that workday hours, even granting the author's central thesis (which I don't), are not the yardstick to use when measuring quality of life. At best it's just one data point in the constellation of factors involved.