While I agree with your comment I can't help but wonder if there's one thing missing that needs to be considered.
Quality of life probably needs to be considered and compared between the time periods. I'm too young and history-ignorant to do that but I wonder if these two, in terms of QoL, coincide with your sentiments or not. My suspicion is that they don't.
- a household (2 adults, 2.3 kids, and a large dog, in a house with a white picket fence)
- single household living in a smaller shitty apartment
The QoL might still actually be better in the smaller, shitty apartment depending on your priorities?
There's the issue of the impact of the larger living space on quality of life - the larger the enclosed space the more money is spent on heating, cooling, cleaning and maintenance, plus the temptation to fill the extra space with all sorts of crap you don't need.
You're absolutely right - there are a ton of measures by which QoL today is better than in the past thanks to technology. I have access to the Internet. Holy shit how I love (and hate) it! Certain types of cancers are survivable, the television per dollar is ridiculous; I, a plebe, have access to jet travel and can travel to pretty much anywhere in the world. (Hell, if you're halfway not-a-plebe, Netjets get you fractional private jet ownership. Kings of the 1200's could scarcely dream of access to that technology) And those are only the first-world things that come to mind. Access to drinking water, toilets, food, anti-malaria and other anti-disease medical technology is far wider. Air-conditioning if you live in hot, electrified parts of the world.
It's just there are priorities that society could prioritize to reduce overall misery compared to where we are today. Why are infants going unfed, children going hungry? Why is medical bankruptcy even a thing? What is the average number of leisure hours per week across the whole economy? Sure, if I work extra hard and guess the right (tech startup) lottery numbers, I could retire and have a 0 hour work week, but for the unlucky masses, what's that average number when less than half the (American) people don't have $500 saved up for an emergency? There's no question that the GDP as a whole, but even per-capita is way up since the 50's *. But is happiness (as a measure as the opposite of misery) also way up? If the World Happiness Report ** went back to the 1950's (or even the pre-Internet 1990's), would we see similar trends? Of course everyone's welcome to their own priorities, but happiness per-capita, as impossible it is to measure, seem entirely reasonable to prioritize for the country/world's economy. What makes a given individual happy won't be uniform, obviously. (I like my small shitty apartment and chose to live there because of the location but I'm fully aware it's also not for everyone.) But the number of hours of leisure (Europeans laugh at the fact that it's measured by hours in the US and not counted by days) or the number of hours per week spent dealing with assholes (boss, co-workers, or customers) would be great things to optimize the economy for.
Quality of life probably needs to be considered and compared between the time periods. I'm too young and history-ignorant to do that but I wonder if these two, in terms of QoL, coincide with your sentiments or not. My suspicion is that they don't.
- a household (2 adults, 2.3 kids, and a large dog, in a house with a white picket fence)
- single household living in a smaller shitty apartment
The QoL might still actually be better in the smaller, shitty apartment depending on your priorities?