Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'
What sucks in reading the bread book is when you get to the bit where he talks about productivity. He has some great figures on the productive output of every industry in France, and what it would take for everyone in France to have enough down to the per capita consumption of meat, grain, etc. And he pointed to the industrial changes that had done so much already: surely the age of plenty for all and copious leisure is right around the corner, if we can just muster the political will! But it doesn't work out like that. We still work a lot. In fact there's a loosely negative correlation between difficulty of a job and standard of living in the U.S. So every time a <i>futurist</i> talks about how AI or automation or whatever is going to give everyone so much free time we won't know what to do with ourselves, I can't help but think back to the facts and figures of this dude writing before we'd even harnessed electricity at scale.