And while you might argue that home-based work is preferable to market work due to having a “kinder, more caring master”, the swift demise of cottage industry once early factories became feasible suggests that folks care more about how productive they are than whether they can work from home.
The folks who were actually around at the time seemed to disagree about that. Plenty of people devised plans for utopian communities where Moloch wouldn’t be a factor, but they cared little for household-based work. (Indeed, some of them assumed that you could get rid of households altogether, and just live in large, factory-like collective arrangements under the supervision of some ‘uncaring’ leader. Of course, modern evo-psych and social anthropology argue against that view.)
I think that was just Moloch.
The folks who were actually around at the time seemed to disagree about that. Plenty of people devised plans for utopian communities where Moloch wouldn’t be a factor, but they cared little for household-based work. (Indeed, some of them assumed that you could get rid of households altogether, and just live in large, factory-like collective arrangements under the supervision of some ‘uncaring’ leader. Of course, modern evo-psych and social anthropology argue against that view.)