Which fields?

Air travel is much, much cheaper and orders of magnitude safer. Progress is crap if you focus on speed but there’s much more to it than that.

Space flight has become vastly cheaper, with it now being feasible to blanket the planet in low-latency high-bandwidth internet connectivity. (Compare with the travails of Iridium just 30 years ago.) Again, progress is crap if you focus on the flashy stuff like boots on the moon, but it’s been tremendous in other ways.

Cars are vastly safer, more reliable, and more efficient. Two entirely new kinds of drivetrain (hybrid and electric) have been developed and popularized.

Medicine has seen huge improvements in cancer treatments, imaging, various medical devices, and drugs of all kinds.

>We have made incredible improvements in alleviating poverty and suffering over the past 50 years

We have also made incredible strides at capturing the productivity and free time that would have fed innovation and effectively transferred it to the financial services industry.

Since schools in the US were desegregated for people of color and women, America embraced a radically neoliberal approach to education. Rather than funding higher education for every citizen who wanted to pursue it now that everyone could, those in power chose to systematically and cynically de-fund higher education and replace it with a degree-for-debt model.

State universities that used to provide low/free tuition to white men, now offer their services to all, for an ever-increasing price.

This has created a society where smart people get on the edu-debt treadmill in search of a better life, only to then be beholden to existing, stagnant profit-maximizing entities to try to pay that debt off for the rest of their lives. This is how innovation has stalled: a top-down systematic defunding that has ensured both gifted and special-needs kids have to fight over scraps.