Seems to me that much economic thinking is buggered and blinded by prevailing myths about what life was like before the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Which is why articles like this, drawing heavily from Sahlin's brilliant Stone Age Economics should be required reading.
An increasing consensus among anthropologists that hunter-gathers did not live lives that were "nasty, brutal, and short", in fact they tended to live lives of relative plenty, prosperity, and leisure.
We modern, industrialized consumer types, buried under a landslide of labor and stifled by a false sense of scarcity are in many ways far worse off, living lives that are busy, boring, and long.
One would think that with the increase in human knowledge over the course of history we could find a happy medium, but even amongst those that are working on major societal changes (sustainability, social justice, labor rights, etc) seem unable or unwilling to stare the truth in the face, namely that for nearly every wonder "progress" has wrought, said wonder has birthed a legion of evils.
This is not to say that I advocate the sort of return-to-Eden primitivism that certain lefty-greens seem enamored of (especially a lot of "deep" ecologists). What I advocate is the movement towards a society that enjoys the benefits of Sahlin's stone age economy along with the liberating (as opposed to enslaving, but that's another blog) technologies developed over the last few centuries.
Thinking that industrialized capitalism is going to solve the problems caused by industrialized capitalism is like thinking that tobacco cures cancer.
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