Related though not necessarily helpful section from Brave New World (1956):<p>&gt; of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be 
perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or 
four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they 
wouldn&#x27;t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half 
ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was 
the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; 
that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far 
from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take 
a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for 
labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.&quot; Mustapha Mond made a 
lavish gesture. &quot;And why don&#x27;t we put them into execution? For the 
sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with ex- 
cessive leisure. It&#x27;s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize 
every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don&#x27;t. We prefer to keep 
a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes-because it 
takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, 
we have our stability to think of. We don&#x27;t want to change. Every 
change is a menace to stability. That&#x27;s another reason why we&#x27;re so 
chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is 
potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a 
possible enemy. Yes, even science.&quot;