You are right. My statement is a huge generalization and I will never be able to find hard supporting evidence in the true sense.
However, my general sentiment stems from looking at the well being of the average person across human history. As humans shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned, the typical human life improved at an astounding rate. On a much smaller scale, I've never seen people work harder than when they had stake in the outcome.
Anecdotes and generalizations, I fully admit. However, I bet many others with a much wider variety of life experiences than I have reach the same conclusion.
Actually, human society hasn't "shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned". Throughout history there have been motions back and forth towards a amore socialist or a more capitalist system. In fact, I'm not sure you can say that we have such a system in any of the Western countries, right now. People don't just work for themselves: they pool a large chunk of their resources together to build common infrastructure necessary for business.
There was one time, however, when human society shifted from a communal hunter-gatherer society to one having private property, and that was the neolithic revolution. It is pretty much universally agreed that it made most people worse off. They had to work more (you're right about that; hunters-gatherers needed to work only 20 hours a week), got more sick, were malnourished, had to give birth to more children, and lived less (until modern technology, that is). It's unclear why this most important revolution in human history happened, but some theories suggest that it was brought about by the only people who benefitted from it: those who quickly became rich.
However, my general sentiment stems from looking at the well being of the average person across human history. As humans shifted towards a system where people earned for themselves and kept what they earned, the typical human life improved at an astounding rate. On a much smaller scale, I've never seen people work harder than when they had stake in the outcome.
Anecdotes and generalizations, I fully admit. However, I bet many others with a much wider variety of life experiences than I have reach the same conclusion.