What exactly is human progress

Lynn Stuart Paramorre writes in her latest piece...

"What exactly is human progress? If progress is the growth of opportunities, then we should welcome developments that give us more options in how we spend our time and structure our lives."

Human progress is the fight against scarcity. As progress is made goods become less scarce society becomes richer. Production, or the transformation of resources into more desirable goods, is the only way that real wealth is created, and with it the standard of living and quality of life is increased. Progress is not the 'growth of opportunities, although the fight against scarcity increases your overall opportunities in life, you can't ignore fighting scarcity as causal to 'increased opportunities' and more options in how we spend our time and structure our lives'. This end simply can not be achieved without fighting scarcity and acting productively as a means.

"But when we get trapped in the mindset of eternal scarcity and laboring until our last breath, we stop imagining that there could be any path in front of us except more and more work."

Working is simply acting, a human can not live without acting to trasnform resources into more desirable goods that improve the human condition. Not working, or slowing productivity, ultimately means a world of 'eternal scarcity'. If you start imagioning a world of less and less work, less productivity, you WILL get trapped in not only a 'mindset', but objectively, in a world of eternal scarcity.

Further, the only reason we should see less and less work is because productivity is so high, and goods are see plentiful, that there is not reason to work as much, but that happens naturally in the market, not by legislative law.

You can achieve less and less work  by fighting scarcity and productivity, but you can't fight scarcity and be prpductive by less and less. There's two causal chains here, one makes sense the other does not.

And that is the contradiction the author doesn't notice in the first paragraph of her piece, and where I stop reading the rest of it.