6 ideas
Most people believe the past was better because they compare the present's visible problems against a romanticized past they never lived in. Measured against the actual historical record of famine, disease, and early death, the pre-industrial world was one of near-universal misery, so the baseline for judging the present should be history, not an imagined ideal.
Progress happens through gradual, cumulative improvements such as a little less hunger or a few more literate people each year. These never become headlines, while disasters are sudden and dramatic. Because the media selects for sudden events, public perception of the world systematically lags behind and runs opposite to the underlying trend lines.
Pollution rises in the early stages of industrialization but falls once societies grow rich enough to afford cleaner technology and to demand environmental protection. Wealth, not poverty, is therefore the precondition for cleaner air and water. Poor countries today pass the pollution peak at lower income levels than rich countries did.
The dramatic fall in extreme poverty since 1820, and especially since 1980, happened where countries opened to trade, markets, and the free flow of ideas, as in China after 1978. Globalization lets poor countries adopt technologies and institutions that took rich countries centuries to develop, compressing the timeline of development.
Clean water and sewage systems prevented more deaths than almost any medical advance by cutting off fecal-oral transmission of cholera, typhoid, and diarrheal disease. Before the germ theory led to public sanitation, cities were population sinks where deaths exceeded births. Separating human waste from drinking water is among the most consequential public health interventions in history.
Declines in violence, slavery, discrimination against women and minorities, and child labor reflect Enlightenment ideas of universal rights spreading alongside literacy, trade, and communication. As people interact with and read about strangers, they extend empathy and legal protection to groups previously excluded, and prejudices become harder to defend publicly.