The article starts out by addressing the very point you're making here: what about bad things that happened in the last decade? His answer is that things can ge

The article starts out by addressing the very point you're making here: what about bad things that happened in the last decade? His answer is that things can get better in big ways, such that things that get worse in small ways don't counterbalance them. I guess also the problem here is that many statements about things getting worse are very subjective, whereas the article tries to focus on objective metrics like absolute poverty, metals usage, etc. And it takes a global view. Your list is pretty large but, for instance, you say "ads everywhere". The internet has been funded by ads for decades. Did it objectively get moreso in the past decade? And if so, isn't the worseness of this purely subjective given that many services we enjoy may not exist without ads or, possibly, would be charged for and thus available only to the rich, in rich countries? This is highly debatable. Whereas "child mortality is at record lows" is metric-based and objectively good. Also many of these are very USA specific, but the worst places to live are really outside the USA. If your child died of TB "too many ads" and "the rise of smart speakers" is going to seem really trivial in comparison. No quantity of ads will counterbalance even a small rise in child mortality as a problem.