Folks like Stephen Pinker (Enlightenment Now), Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist), and Max Roser (Our World in Data) have done a compelling job of presenting data that shows poverty has decreased substantially in recent generations.
The article really does glamorize the pre-industrial past. Since the author doesn't use facts to back up the claim that industrialization has made people's lives worse, how about looking at caloric intake over the past 800 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-supply-o...
that's actually a terrible metric. During the height of the early industrial revolution the life expectancy in Liverpool fell to 25(!) years, despite higher caloric intake as people were basically put through a manual labour meatgrinder.
This is actually the glamorized superficial narrative that you're accusing the author of. More calories = progress, graphs go up = everyone happy.
For most of industrialisation life was actually extremely harsh, monotonous, life expectancy fell, communal ties were destroyed and that's the case in much of the developing world today. Yuval Noah Harari gives a good overview in Sapiens as well.
It is an impressively disingenuous piece (if I may use the author's own preferred word). First, he describes economics history statistics time-series as essentially made up (I'm sure the economic historians like Deaton will be pleased to know that we know absolutely nothing about long-term trends in per capita income etc); then he turns out and claims that people were actually far better off before any statistics he deems sufficiently reliable (I guess there must be some other datasets which are reliable, what a pity we can't use it for anything else). So, the statistics that contradict him are dismissed, and he makes up the ones that favor him. Then he shifts to a nirvana fallacy: because getting out of extreme poverty still leaves you in considerable poverty, actually, it's no progress at all! Wait, there's more: poverty is increasing, because if you look at absolute numbers, there's 'we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today.' (Let us take a moment to ponder the intellectual honesty of an author who slides so silently from per capita or inequality to absolute numbers.) But don't worry, it really doesn't matter where all those people come from or per capita vs population growth, po-tah-to poh-ta-toe, because most of them are in China, and China, is, he informs you, not a victory for 'Washington-consensus neoliberalism' (because I guess they got all that economic growth by Mao-style collectivization of farms...?), so definitely don't try to use China as an argument for capitalism or anything crazy like that.
The graphs at https://econographics.wordpress.com/tag/wages/ paint a less rosy picture. [1] is I think what is sometimes cited. Which does show growth, but slower than productivity growth. A quick glance at the graph on top of the wiki page you linked suggests it's consistent with it. But [2] is I think most often cited, and shows hardly any growth at all post 1972 or so. I'd also be interested to know why it looks so different from your graph and [1]. Perhaps how 'real income' is defined differs from the adjustments [2] made.
