Is the world really better than ever?

In the book Sapiens, the author makes a rather well researched and convincing argument that humans truly had their best times as hunter/gatherers. Generally if you were part of a tribe, you ate and survived and likely even reproduced. You were probably physically in decent shape but you were at the mercy of things like, larger predators, weather and disease. Humanity as a whole is CURRENTLY at their most prosperous, but for an individual human today whether or not you are better off is very very dependent on where you live. We live in a bubble in the West. And statistics are misleading to the plight of those not living in cosy, developed resource hungry nations. Further, we really need to work hard to maintain what we have. We need to reduce our population, depletion of resource and carbon footprint to not screw it up what's good. The questions is not whether the earth can support more humans, but if humanity NEEDS more humans to continue prospering. If we are to survive as a race and continue to prosper, our greatest innovations, whether or social or technological, will be around using less or being more efficient in deploying what we have.

If you're interested in this topic, I did lots of data analysis to show the nature of the skew in death coverage vs actual deaths in the New York Times:

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

My own view is that much of the mismatch between coverage and reality can be explained by media economics, where reader interest and media incentives encourage the coverage of extreme events. And while my data focuses on traditional media, I wouldn't be surprised if social media has a much greater skew.

I'd recommend the book The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker. The article reminded me of it, but Pinker demonstrates why violence in our society has decreased over time (even though many people would intuitively think it's the opposite).