Plague, famine, et al, sure sounds happier and healthier than compared to modern (First World) living.
Even if you look back at hunter-gatherer societies where it's been claimed that leisure time was substantially greater than today, things like infant mortality make that seem like hell.
I take these type of historical deconstructions with a large grain of salt; it used to be the idea of the Noble Savage, now it's moving on to medieval times.
Those changes in infant mortality, for example, are largely due to better hygiene around births and in handling infants. Wash your hands and boil your water; you can still be in an agrarian economy and do this.
A society which knows about warp travel, but has chosen to live an agrarian lifestyle again, while keeping their technological knowledge.
I think it comes from a pretty triumphalist view of the last 300 years rather than any real history. So basically: I agree.
Nobody had modern medicine or electricity that far back anyway.
By now there's no reason for anyone urban or rural to do without medicine or electricity unless their society is consuming more than it produces, or is handling surplus in unbalanced ways.
Maybe paradise would be more within reach if those little problems could be overcome.
> "In managing the earth, vegetation and animals, the first priority of medieval men and women was to produce food, but they also expected to receive the benefits of their work in the foreseeable future, so the practised (to use the modern term) 'sustainable' agriculture. They planned for the same land to yield crops regularly, and the appreciated that well-managed resources renewed themselves. They anticipated the changeability of the seasons and the harvests, and hoped that their farming methods would allow them to survive in a year of unusual weather, for example by planting a variety of crops. At no time or place within our period can they be described as 'subsistence farmers' [emphasis added], in the sense that they ate only food that they had grown, or that they produced solely for their own consumption needs. They always expected that their land would yield a surplus, whether for the benefit of the state, the church or their lords, or for exchange for goods and services which they could not obtain from their own land.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that the industrial revolution was obviously bad for most people, but to say it was obviously good is wrong too. It's a complex thing, and it's not clear whether people are happier or even healthier in an industrial economy than an agrarian one.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=82zXFn-EDisC