The right amount of work is somewhere around four to six hours a day. It would solve lots of issues. For example, most kids are in school endless numbers of hours not because they are learning, but because most schooling before high school is essentially day care. Schools would then let out in four hours as well, and some of the rest of the time parents would spend with their kids.
I sometimes wonder if in modern societies work is a covert action not to increase wealth, but to keep people occupied so that they don't get the urge to do evil to each other. Otherwise, what is the force that ultimately will have people working three jobs just to survive? If you educated all these people, where are the jobs that would allow them employment? You see, I don't have the answer(s). What I do know is that the current system (all known economic theories) is clearly flawed, and flawed badly.
One final note that hints at the complexity of the problem. Perhaps you are aware of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It basically says that the consistency of a system cannot be proved within the system itself. And this is in pure logic. We are trying to come up with a system that is not only economically consistent (self sustaining etc), but moral, green, etc. We will never know that we have achieved this system logically, we can only intuit it.
