Currently larger percentage or countries are democratic than ever before. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_of_nations_1800-2003_scorin

Currently larger percentage or countries are democratic than ever before. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_of_nations_1800-2003_scoring_8_or_higher_on_Polity_IV_scale.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Number_o... Smaller percentage or world population is malnourished than ever before. http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-undernourishment/ http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/hunger-and-u... Your last point is true in some sense, because more people live in cities than ever before. And you can say any city is under-maintained if you put your standards high enough. Due to this effect, there are mixed results in global sanitation trends. Access to clean water is improving, but I can't say for overall picture.