I never said bad things don't happen. Bad things happen all the time, constantly. The poorest people on earth have a lower quality of life relative to the wealthiest people on Earth than ever before in history, but that is largely because the wealthiest people on earth have never been as wealthy as they are now. I reckon there are few places where the quality of life right now is significantly worse than it was in that location 1,000 years ago.

The one exception, of course, is climate change. Hundreds of millions, potentially billions of people will be killed within the next couple of centuries due to anthropogenic climate change. I still hold that humanity as a whole is making progress, largely because I can't think of a single empire in the past that wouldn't exploit fossil fuels more than we do now, if they knew how to.