Two issues: 1. Human desires increase over time, so virtually nobody is going to accept the lifestyle of a few decades ago as acceptable for their retirement.

Two issues: 1. Human desires increase over time, so virtually nobody is going to accept the lifestyle of a few decades ago as acceptable for their retirement. A few decades ago, people whining that they can no longer afford an international vacation would have been resoundingly mocked. Now people unironically say society is in decline because they cannot afford to travel internationally or cannot afford vacation property (when neither were ever the norm, but have become relatively so). People will get sympathy at the high cost of going to restaurants and bars. My grandparents view complaining about that as ridiculous, as to them, those things are luxury goods, but to our generation, they are just day to day life. Frankly, you will expect a much higher standard of living in retirement than what you have today. 2. Some of our most expensive goods and services really aren't enhanced by technology, at least not in a consume the same for less kind of way. Most notably, housing and healthcare. For these, we want to consume ever more and so much so that the cheaper options tend to simply disappear from the market. Consider that my father as an upper middle class person grew up in a 1200 sqft house. That is what dual income professionals bought back in the day. But you can't really easily buy a 1200 sqft house today (you can in a condo, but that is a very different lifestyle). That house had one bathroom. You would be hard pressed to find a house without a bathroom a person unless it was very old (and those are getting torn down). It used to be that low wage people lived simply in quasi boarding houses/permanent motels. But you cannot build those today or at least virtually nobody does. So rather than having a cheaper 1200 sqft house with one bathroom, we went with 2500 sqft houses with 5 bathrooms, with an increase in the price. So yes, the future is definitely more prosperous, as 2500 sqft is more than 1200, but it isn't an option to take the 1200 sqft for cheaper unless you go and live in old housing stock in a rural area where it has not been torn down. You can't live simply in a hotel style cheap apartment anymore as those aren't legal in many places and even if they were, people do not tolerate them nearby. With healthcare, we don't pay less for the same outcomes, but are increasingly paying multiples more for better ones and you get the standard of care, not what was around 20 years ago.