> You would have to be very unlucky to be worse off than your grandparents, given the enlargement in material goods available. There is nothing airy about material progress - we are communicating electronically thanks to it.
Material and/or technical progress seem less problematic than Social Progress in the Whig sense we were talking about. Though even material progress is not always monotonic, as in the case of the transition from the "ancient" economy to the "feudal" (the scare quotes are just there to indicate how unsatisfactory these terms are).