I addressed this in a comment adjacent to yours and I think it's a good point, but I don't think it's sufficient to explain why most people don't accept a 1920 standard of living in exchange for doing less work. I'd like to see most of those regulations repealed, but I have a hard time believing the result would be a bunch of full-time workers cutting back their hours to live more simply. What people would do, instead, is consume all the resulting productivity gains as quickly as they could.