The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost.

Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.

Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.

It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.

It's definitely not the best we have though. People have created all kinds of metrics which measured things in better ways more relevant to our human goals. It's an entire genre of publication in economics and some of them are very popular. It's a choice to ignore them.

Also, see what djtango said. It's not that simple.

All of those except for access to knowledge were better in the U.S. 20-30 years ago even though GDP per capita "grew" even in real terms.

People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth, housing costs, tuition costs, healthcare costs, jobs).

In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...

Yes, the bottom 90% have had their lives improve a little. But nowhere near the same as the top 10%.

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations.

A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite.

Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

It hasn't been the best for a long time, and economist have long proposed alternatives, but gdp and gdp per capita seem to be the easiest to calculate and convey.

Yes, look at the massive 'success' of Vail, Colorado.

20 years ago? probably not significantly different accept at the margins (i.e. we tamed HIV and now have ways to defend against pandemics) but other than that is life much different?

Just a couple of decades ago a common working stiff could buy their family a nice home in any US city.

Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers.

And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.

It's utter trash, it was good when we had industry focused economies instead of service focused ones.

Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services

One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk brits coming in your strip clubs aren't that useful anymore