Sure, there are a few things better now than in the past, but I do not believe those 'gains' amount to anything significant, when taken in a global context.
Just look at the billions in the world who go to sleep hungry each night, the people dying of diseases, the billions of workers who work in piss-poor conditions for pennies an hour. What does that get us? A life of relative comfort and luxury here in the industrialized world, but it was built on the blood and exploitation of the world's poor. And as we're finding out now, it's not sustainable, and has come back to bite us on the ass. How many are unemployed in NA right now? How many are "better off" now than if they had a small piece of land to work, and didn't need to work 16 hour days, 6 days a week, just to pay the bills, if they can even find such work? You call that progress? I call that an absolute humanitarian failure.
And yes, people starved to death 100 years ago, in fact, this has happened throughout the history of mankind. The middle ages, cited earlier, were rough. At least today we can do something about it if we have the will. But we clearly don't. And that's where I see the failure. Using Ethiopia as an example, thousands upon thousands died, and other countries barely even acknowledged it was happening, until it was nearly too late. Again, abject failure of humanity as a whole.
From an ecological point of view, we're far worse off than in the past. When coal and wood fuels were the mainstream, the damage wasn't always as visible, but rest assured today's pollution is having a more damaging effect on the environment than in the past. We know this as fact, yet we do little to nothing about it. Hell, we're expanding on the oilsands, even though it is completely destroying the environment. Many species have lost habitat, and many more are on the verge of extinction. Humanity, with some small exceptions, really doesn't care.
From an economic point of view, lots more people have well paying jobs than in the past. However, there is also a much greater need for money now than there was in the past. In most parts of the world, people have been driven off their lands, forced out of their sustainable, agriculturally based lifestyles, into overcrowded and polluted cities where they beg for worse jobs than they had working the land. Many, many of these people haven't received any benefit from the modernistic amenities that go along with progress.
For a large portion of the worlds population, 'better' isn't really.
Clearly, there are many things that are better than they were a century ago, but I don't think the overall 'holistic health' rating is any better now, and I think we're running headlong towards worse, and I don't think people really care, because they'll be dead and gone by the time it matters to them.
