People look at the past with rose colored glasses.
2) The % of the world living in extreme poverty has declined dramatically in the past half century.
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9145467/extreme-poverty-global-...
The story of the last 50 years is really about members of the western middle class finally having to deal with competition from the rest of the world due to globalization. While this has certainly had some downsides for the western middle class it has been an INCREDIBLY HUGE BOON for everyone else. It's very hard to overstate how fast east asia has transformed from poverty to relative wealth and how good this has been for hundreds of millions of people.
Go look at a picture of what Shanghai looked like in 1990 vs today: http://gizmodo.com/5558350/shanghai-skyline-before-and-after
But it's a massive improvement if you talk about the numbers who were living in poverty and now aren't.
Much progress. Much yet to do. Both are true.
Having seen the changes over last 20 years in India, the middle class is now a lot vulnerable and in the fix with absolutely zero safety net. The earning power of the middle class might have doubled but the expenses and the standard of living has increased manifolds, thus pushing them further to the bottom.
It was through these discussions and sharing of perspective - just one man's view of the world - that I was taught to value health, happiness, and appreciate a life not defined by the materialism that could've been a real sink-hole for me if I'd tried to achieve even greater "status" than he did.
Just to put a last bit of context on it, every five years of so my parents would think about getting a used Corvette convertible, but they could never justify what seemed like such a wasteful purchase...by comparison, my Dad drove a 1991 Ford Ranger pickup, purchased new, babied as a second vehicle, until eventually selling it with 80,000 miles on it for 3x the book value sometime around 2010.
I'm a big-time car guy and have dreamed of a Lamborghini Countach since forever. But now, having lived in the "real world" for over a decade, I'm just happy to have a nice 4-banger Toyota with good air conidtioning, tinted windows that gets 30 mpg when I keep my foot out of it. Looking at 2008, all I can think about is how greed is a terrible, toxic basis for a value system.