Living standards have risen due to productivity gains being distributed across society. Factors such as wise policy and labor unions contributed to this effect. These factors are largely absent today. Productivity gains have flowed mostly to the ownership class since the mid 1970s (this is the pay-productivity gap). As the article notes, 50% of people identify groceries as a major cause of stress, which doesn’t sound like a medieval king. Society has the capacity to make life better for everyone. It requires collective action to redistribute wealth from the ownership class across society however.

Even raising living standards for the poor through redistribution wouldn’t solve all our problems. Concentration of wealth is itself a net negative because it is concentration of power. Greater wealth concentration makes society more undemocratic, even if the bottom 50% were to become richer. Today billionaires have so much money that a group of them has gotten together to fund the abandonment of democracy in the US. They are largely succeeding. We are collapsing into “illiberal democracy” - a phenomenon that has been spreading across the globe in recent years. Our greatest problems, like climate change, worsen as wealthy interests prop up policies of denial rather than effective solutions.

A medieval king had political control. If society was heading in a direction that was going to harm them, they could do something about it. But members of the modern day middle class have virtually no political control. That is concentrated in the hands of the few and harms us all.