>The fact that a relatively low income individual has access to a large number of goods and services which were once considered exclusive to the wealthy is a clear indication that technological progress has continued at a steady pace.

No, it's just a clear indication of market efficiencies and/or better engineering.

It doesn't say anything about what the grandparent asked for: the rate and magnitude of new scientific/technologic discoveries.

One era (early 20th) is the industrial revolution; one era (approx. 1960-now) is the information revolution. It is true that the industrial revolution has slowed down and mostly focused on incremental improvements, but it seems strange to discount the information revolution gains completely. There's been a lot of information revolution gains.

That said, I would argue that medicine too has made some pretty significant advances in the 2nd half of the 20th century... mostly in surgery techniques (transplants are 2nd half 20th century), scanning techniques (NMR and CT both were 2nd half 20th century), and pharmaceuticals. Significant vaccines (polio, measles, mumps) were 2nd half of the 20th century developments. Genetic science has made huge gains as of late. Etc.

But half of the "world of atoms" things the grandparent listed were also market efficiencies or better engineering. Trading average speed for vast improvements in energy efficiency in aircraft in order to make flight accessible to the masses certainly involved vastly more progress of a technical and scientific nature in the late twentieth century than the cited early twentieth century example of wider replication of well-understood principles of plumbing to give the masses indoor toilets.

"Market efficiencies and/or better engineering" are often enabled by technological breakthroughs.

Consider the efficiencies generated by Amazon's highly automated warehouses; their level of automation wouldn't have been feasible in, say, the 60's. Substantial technological progress on multiple fronts has been required.

Actually it isn't. As Peter Thiel would say, globalization is the copying of existing technology, it is not the manufacture of new ones.

One reason we have stagnated can be revealed in the bias of our new language. Where we once used the terms "1st World" and "3rd World" we now use "Developed" and "Developing" -- language that is excessively bullish about globalization while implicitly pessimistic about technology.