Progress over the past 50 years. Overall, better or worse?

After posting on the school thread I got to thinking about the way of life a few decades ago compared to today. Sure there are loads of things that are much better, but as to quality of life, better? Hardly. I know I'll be screamed at about how progress is a good thing, but is it always? As I said there, at age 11 we all had a damn good standard of literacy, even the less able kids, and we played together physically in the sunshine, not alone at a laptop...

On Sky News, interviewing an old woman about the flooding in Salisbury, she said that 20 or so years ago the rivers were regularly dredged, that there were "old codgers" who used to open sluice gates to let off the water, and they hardly had any floods. Now, the Government Agency spend millions on having landscaping their facilities and employing more managers, but don't bother to dredge rivers any more. We can see the result. So - is that good progress? Not in my books.

Things have gotten worse in my opinion.

The main reason is the increase in population - less fields, more stress, more crime, and you'll read something incredibly awful one day but the next something worse comes along and the previous one is forgotten, and it goes on...

Those in the majority are overlooked because there are so many of us now and the infrastructure just isn't capable of stopping for a second to take a look at the picture in detail.

It will get worse as the population increases. Everything will get worse with a higher population.

Everything!

If we had the best of the 40's/50' and 60's - the population level, the literacy and numercy, the community spirit, the vitual lack of drugs, the majority of people willing to be a very useful and hard working 'indian' all their lives and get satisfaction from their job and vocations and fewer 'chiefs' and 'assistant chiefs' in every walk of life, availability of more jobs than just the service industry and combine it with all the good progress, life would be pretty good.