Yes. With scientific and engineering advances, we in the "first world" have all the royalty-level of power and energy at our disposal. Washing machine alone is

Yes. With scientific and engineering advances, we in the "first world" have all the royalty-level of power and energy at our disposal. Washing machine alone is an equivalent of a maid or two. The ability to just sit down whenever and enjoy a play or a concert on TV is something you can do now, while it was utterly impossible for even the most powerful kings. If you couple this with advances in medicine it's safe to say that we live our lives in comfort and safety unheard of ever before, to the point that kings of the past, with all the personnel, seem trivial. Meanwhile, "Haitan slaves" - or just normal people who didn't have the luck to born where they should - live exactly the same way they lived hundreds and possibly thousands of years ago. They struggle every day just to have something to eat and they die of hunger if they fail. The technology they use is the same as it was a thousand years back. In effect, the gap between rich and poor only widened in time. And that's comparing low end to a average in first world countries. It gets really ugly when we start comparing low end with top 1% - it's the difference between struggling to just stay alive another day and taking a leisure trip to the ISS (or was it Mir back then?). The difference between having half of your family dead before your thirties and having a healthy life with all your friends well into 80s. So in short, yes, living conditions of a king and a peasant were worlds apart but it did get markedly worse with time.