And of course, in reality, people are better off today by a fair amount. See Are You Better Off Today than you would have been 25 or 50 years ago?
Some of the comments are based on faulty understanding of how things were done. For instance, the blogger talked about houses not having air conditioning back then. What the blogger failed to realize or refused to admit was that houses were designed differently when air conditioning was not available. Houses in hot areas had to be designed with good ventilation that allowed the heat to get out of the house. On extremely hot days, those measures weren't all that effective. Undoubtedly, those people weren't quite as comfortable then as we are today when conditions are at their worst. On the other hand, a modern house with the air conditioner broken is much worse than a house would have been back when it was designed to ventilate without air conditioning.
I'm not advocating that we become Luddites of some form and try to revert to 50's era technology. The point is not that life was better when there were fewer toys to buy. The point is that maintaining anything close to a modern life requires a greater percentage of our incomes than it did in the past. In many ways, we are working harder and falling further behind. Productivity that we used to spend on the best that was available at the time is now spent on taxes for programs that are hurting our society, on the legal industry that sucks productivity from every other part of society, on a public education system that has lost much of its quality and on private education to replace what public education once did, and on a host of other things mentioned by other posters.
Bill