I see two sides:

- we're better off because there is less human suffering "per capita" for lack of a better word.

- we're worse off because technology has allowed us all to instantly see and learn about every human (and animal) atrocity anywhere in the world.

I'm sure if I keyed up a gore site right now I could find the latest mexican cartel atrocity, or a necklacing in Africa, or someone somewhere else being cruelly hurt. But in the 1950s you had to pay for a paper which was excessively rate-limited and narrow in scope.

In that argument, Pinker is playing the role of court academic.

I have no doubt Steven Pinker is very well off indeed.

How is that different than my dad saying the cliche "Back in the day we had it much worse?" It's just a book to make the same conservative point. Since when did any child of a parent hearing that ("Back in the day, we didn't have food / shelter / etc.") respond in agreement? Talking about how much worse things were back then is beside the point, because it is the wrong category of comparison to make. It just shows the person - a parent, a teacher, Prof. Pinker - saying it is out of touch and doesn't understand the actual complaint in todays' context. It's just paternalism expressed with more words.

In fact I can answer my question in another way. We do not exist as a hive collective and nor ought we individuals compare our lives to an alternate life living in the past. A historical societal fact that is technically does not apply to the problems of individual people living today. It was wrong of Pinker to inconsiderately apply those historical facts on the level of societies by further making his implied political points about the individual needs of the marginalized and the oppressed today, but in public that is what he has constantly done.