I heard an Econtalk podcast by Russ Roberts in which he interviewed Gregg Easterbrook. The interview is about his book 'The Progress Paradox'. You can read about the book here.
The core message of the book is that we are hugely better off than our ancestors were. We are, on average, better off than we were ten years ago. Productivity is the key to this, as by being more productive we are able to consume more stuff than we used to.
Stuff doesn't just mean more TVs. It also means more health care, education, personal care, leisure, travel, heating, air conditioning, food, culture. The extent to which we are better off is much greater than most people imagine. Our standard of living is hundreds or thousands of times higher now than a hundred years ago. It is either being bad at maths (not understanding how even a few percent improvement per year when compounded over a century can add up to a huge aggregate increase in welfare.
There is a romanticism about the past. We mainly remember the chroniclers of the evils of the Industrial Revolution, but must be remembered is that urbanisation happened in the UK because the towns were better places to live than the country: otherwise there would not have been a huge migration to them. This is equally true throughout the world now, but especially in China.
