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I also subscriber to (1), and I agree that conditions are generally improving for most people. I think some of the pushback against Pinker is that his message is used as a justification to do no more. There's a reason that the worst of the right love to promote him.

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In his book(s?), Pinker's conclusion is that we need to learn why things are/were improving, and make sure to do more of that. For things that are improving, that has to be something we were doing very recently. The attitude he pushes against is that everything is terrible and needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

(1) and (2) might empirically-speaking look similar over long enough timescales.

Also if (2) is correct then fundamental progress, arising from periodic breakthroughs, depends more upon who we are than what we do. Doing stuff would then lead to incremental improvements which are still important but which depend themselves on previous breakthroughs.

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