Sorry, saw the post below and it's getting buried, so I'm reviving it.
The Pinker Thesis is a compelling one from a materialist point of view: fewer people in poverty, fewer people contracting life-threatening viruses, greater workplace opportunities for women, et cetera.
From a materialist, secular humanist perspective, it's completely obvious why this is a persuasive argument.
However, it's a curious position to be taken by conservatives, who, at least allegedly, should recognize that such measurements do not appraoch a totality in terms of gauging how well we're doing overall as human beings. In western socities, we also see, to name a few: falling life expectancies, soaring levels of loneliness, climbing levels of depression among children, the collapse of the family - horrendous levels of illegitimacy in impoverished populations, epidemic levels of addiction in poor rural areas and poor urban areas, epidemic levels of unreported violent crimes in cities due to victim/witness intimdation and subcultural norms(which distorts the crime picture), the collapse of community due in no small part(and on several levels) to technological innovations, the increased use of technology to victimize children, the rapid disappearance of civic and fraternal organizations, the degradation of the arts into the banal and the profane.
It should be hardly surprising to conservatives that as the spiritual deficit increases in many western societies, all the markers of the Pinker Thesis don't render a happier, or, at least, a more contented people. Misery finds its way into people's lives down various avenues. Cherry-picking data that focuses exclusively on the materal leaves you in a situation where purveyors of this perspective have to shout at the populace, "Why aren't you people happier?!? Don't you know how great things are???" None of the things they cite speak to the underlying reason people grow unhappier with each passing year, at least in western societies.