Imma up this from a comment: /// I’m a fan of Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics, as well as a decent student of history and lit across the centuries, and on balance I don’t remember everything I ever read being awash in masses of objectively hopeless people. On the contrary. So, to answer your question, no. Vaccines and antibiotics and gender equity are all TRULY EXCELLENT, and I want more of the same for more people. But the assumption that everyone in the past was miserable because Twinkies hadn’t been invented yet — which is basically what the cult of modern economics argues — is silly. And there’s no evidence for it. There is, however, a great deal of evidence (i.e., pretty much all of human history and culture) that people saw their worlds as adequate or even abundant. We could argue that they were all deluded and just didn’t understand how great Twinkies are, but then our descendants could say the same of us, which sort of undermines our claim to final authority on the subject. ///