That’s true, but land titles were also being given out in the early 19th century, and I think that even in the later part of the century most farmers were growing food for their families alongside the cash crops.
The change from US farm families seeking a “comfortable competence” through independent, subsistence farming to becoming capitalists dependent on cash and cash crops is discussed by Daniel Vickers in his book Farmers and Fishermen, which is mentioned by the Matt Damon character in Goodwill Hunting, and of course discussed by many other US historians. That dream/myth of independence on the land is still around, though the reality even scarcer.
England is one example but hardly the only one. While small farmers have existed throughout history, the term peasant is a fairly modern one applied mainly to Europeans of the medieval and later periods. They existed under any of a large number of relationships to the land and to lords. That meant they had a variety of “rights” or often none at all. History tells us that they did not appreciate how wonderful their lives were, at least if one looks at this seemingly endless list of peasants revolts, the majority of which are European and from 1300 on.
America is the example I know best. The lack of humanity accorded to the indigenous populations allowed the land to be reallocated by the government, although there was a requirement that the land must be worked for a period of years to confirm ownership. I wouldn’t say that a “great many” urban people jumped at the chance. There simply weren’t that many urban dwellers in that era. Most of those who moved west were fleeing worn-out land in the northeast and so already were farmers.
Then, famously, tens of millions of Europeans, peasants primarily, fled to America. Some of them did take up farming in the midwest. But until immigration was cut off in 1924, the millions went to cities and factory work.
Once the localized bumps are smoothed out, I can’t find a reasonable argument against our living in the best time. The availability of medicine alone guarantees that. I’m old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was introduced. Virtually every bit of medicine in our world today dates from after that.
A billion people have been moved to the middle class in recent decades worldwide. They are not forced to riot against enormous odds just to achieve survival. Wars and other ails continue to exist, but the mountain that has been scaled is unprecendented in world history.
Sure, but when was anyone just being a subsistence farmer?
Medieval peasants had to work their lord’s land and in exchange were allowed to farm a small plot for themselves. They weren’t free to leave, marry who they wanted, etc. Not quite chattel slavery but not far off.
Since then, farmers have generally endeavored to produce a surplus that could be sold at the market - few were just subsistence farmers.
Climate change and environment seem to get worse every year. Huge wealth inequality. Top 1% control the world in some ways. War in Gaza and Ukraine, and other places at times. Global terrorism. Doomsday clock is almost midnight. Housing crisis in much of USA. No, I prefer the good old days.
Could you specify just when the “good old days” were? When there was no wealth inequality? When the rich didn’t control the world? When there weren’t wars? When kids were told to hide under their desks to protect them from the atomic bomb? When there was slavery?
Or when Pittsburgh was covered in a layer of soot? When rivers were filled with sewage? Or take England when London coal gave them blackout fogs and the Themes stank so much that Parliament couldn’t sit?
When New York City had areas where the housing density was worse than Calcutta?
Or Calcutta?
When exactly were these good old days? And where? And for whom?
Are we being judged by what we are leaving future generations?
According to Reddit, the 1990’s. Despite the replies in the linked thread, I still have suspicions about the demographic that believes this.
An excellent question. For all the horrors of the past, I fear that within a few generations everyone will agree the best time was “any time before our dipshit ancestors wrecked the planet” 
Which is of course a highly laudable development, but the conclusion that’s drawn from it—that we should just keep on with the current capitalistic system—is both logically invalid (simple example: winning the lottery doesn’t mean that playing the lottery is in general a sound strategy) and actively dangerous (we are on the verge of ecological collapse in so many ways it would only be tiresome to write them out). In my example, the neighbor lives an objectively better life while going deep into debt, but that doesn’t make doing so a sound strategy. And as I noted, a fair bit of people rising up from squalid conditions has to do with the fact that imperialist exploitation has eased up (or at any rate, become less overt)—but that exploitation is a huge factor in our current wealth. So it’s a little like congratulating ourselves on the improvement of the lives of the other kids we’ve stopped beating up for their lunch money.
And again, all in all, we’re not actually doing so well. Here’s a good video by The Market Exit about how we’re not really as happy as we think we are, how being richer doesn’t generally mean being better off (in particular mentally—in fact, the correlation inverts at a certain point, on a national scale), and also how Pinker uses a few statistical tricks, like plotting on a log scale to make a correlation seem stronger than it is, to make his points:
I’ve only skimmed the thread, but I want to say one thing that I haven’t seen yet (though maybe I missed it):
I think we humans are more sensitive to whether things are getting better or worse than to whether things are good or bad (for those literate in calculus: to the first derivative of our circumstances and standards of living).
So it’d only feel like we’re living in the “best time” if things were currently improving and looked like they were going to continue to improve.
Let’s not pretend that anyone in the past would have magically been better about it than our predecessors. They weren’t exactly any better, driving any number of species to extinction, having multiple civilizations collapse due to environmental degradation, and the like.
The only difference is that we’re better equipped these days, both to do harm and to prevent/rectify it.
Yeah, we’re sensitive to the slope of the curve at the present time, not necessarily the general trend of the curve, or the area under it. Right now, the slope is somewhat flat or even negative, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not higher on the Y axis than ever before, or that the area under the curve has become much larger in recent history.
I don’t get this. Ancient Rome or Medieval Europe had the potential to be just as great (in terms of life expectancy, personal freedom, etc) as modern day America and Europe. There were just societal reasons they were unable to meet that potential. That’s no different to today, hell yeah we could be a better society, but just like Angevin England there are societal why we don’t meet that potential. I’d argue the difference between what they could be to what they are is far greater for the Angevin ruled England than Trump ruled America
What bugs me about all this is, yeah, we are living in better times than any of our ancestors, but we are also probably living in better times than any of descendants 
Basically, we are the big “flare up” before the sun dies out.
Well said. This is the unsustainably bright glow just before the match goes out.
As to the overall attitude to take about the world & such, it’s often said that conservatives compared the situation to their nearest bogeyman and gloat at being better, while progressives compare the situation to perfection and feel despondent about the gap. Or in shorthhand:
MAGA: We’re better than North Korea!! Woot!!! We’re Number One !!!
Progressives: We are soooo far short of Star Trek.
Trying to embrace the Panglossian view, we have:
Better medical treatments and drugs than ever before, with chances at extended and productive lives in the face of ailments that resulted in profound disability and premature death not all that long ago. Vaccines have saved millions of lives.
Stopped and in some cases reversed environmental degradation and ceased using pesticides like arsenic that were common up till the 1940s. We’re now debating the alleged horrors of glyphosate, which is much safer than previous herbicides that were sprayed in massive quantities. Air quality has markedly improved. Ozone depletion has reversed.
Western countries at least have stayed out of massive armed conflicts for the most part over recent decades.
Of course, a substantial amount of this progress is threatened by current politicians in power. But it’ll take time for serious damage to be done, before which point some of these sleazes will be tossed out.
I must go cultivate my garden now.
It makes me think of a trope in RPGs, where the characters know about some ancient civilization that was far more advanced than the present time the game is set in. That’s us. If society ever does rebuild from what seems to me an upcoming major decline, we’ll be the mythical advanced ancients. Sort of like the ancient aliens that some people talk about, except we’ll have actually been real.
I’m not clear on why you’re saying the Enclosure Acts were necessary. What do you feel made them necessary?
I’m also not clear why you keep bringing up the Enclosure Acts when they undermine your argument. You say that peasants had a right to their land. But the Enclosure Acts demonstrates that this wasn’t true. The landowners owned the land and the peasants just had a right to work on it - but only up to the point where the landowner decided he no longer wanted peasants to work on his land. Then the peasants were evicted.
I also think your argument that peasants were at less risk of starvation or infectious disease is wrong. Peasants were tied to the land. When the local crops failed or a plague passed through the area, they did not have the option of moving to another region.
This was not true for urban workers. They were not tied to their job or their city. If the city they lived in was threatened by starvation or disease or an invading army, they at least had the possibility of fleeing to another city.
I keep seeing subsistence farming mentioned in this thread. As far as I know, subsistence farming is when the farmer produce enough food to feed themselves but there isn’t a surplus for trade. It’s not accurate to think of medieval famers, and certainly not farmers in colonial America, as subsistence farmers as they all produced in excess of what was necessary to feed themselves. American farmers in particular enjoyed turning that surplus into whisky which is why they were irate when the government started taxing John Barleycorn.
The J Curve of Rising Expectations is sometimes trotted out to explain otherwise inexplicable behavior. To oversimplify, it states that people will live through what appear to be objectively awful times but revolt at other times which may seem to be getting better.
The difference lies in the expectations people have about the future. If they expect that things should be getting better but they think are not doing so, then the line of perceived reality curves downward, forming a J curve and creating an “intolerable” gap. The graph is shown here.
The basic argument is that persistent growth and improvement leads people to develop psychological expectations that things will continue to get better. When such expectations are suddenly thwarted, people experience an intolerable gap between expectations and realities of their circumstances. Essentially, this explains how individuals decide to riot or rebel based on a set of “psychological ideas”–if there is a gap between their psychological expectations and environmental reality, and this frustration is not addressed, they will respond with aggression.
Davis formulated this in 1962, presumably with the civil rights movement’s activism in full view, but applied it to a range of revolts. Like most things in political science, the validity of the J Curve is disputed, but it provides a way to think about about why so many people here are downplaying the fantastic and totally unexpected gains of the post-WWII world. They no longer expect the world to get better, so the past gains that we benefit from are not meaningful.
Conversely, MAGA, and other right-wing movements in Europe, are full of people who continue to expect improvements and are rebelling against the powers-that-be.