[e_i_pi_2]

This is somewhat true but also somewhat not - we have a lower chance of childhood mortality, but only in some countries. We have a general higher standard of living, but income inequality is worse than it's ever been. We have less people dying in wars, but when we do have them more people die than ever would have in the past. I'd recommend "The better angels of our nature" as a book for more on this - it covers human history of this well and shows the tradeoffs we've been making at the same time. The average person today has more creature comforts than a king a hundred years ago, but at the same time almost no one today has as much vacation time as a medieval peasant did