Most HN users are going to say “yes” because we are generally much higher income earners. Have things gotten better for everyone? Definitely not. Looking at continued increase in “deaths of despair” it seems like some of the changes that have made some of us richer have also made a larger % of the population more miserable than ever.

We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.

To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.