Science, Technology, and Democracy
In pre-industrial societies, two of the most valuable resources were fertile land and human labor. Therefore, wars were waged for millennia to acquire land by force and to enslave others.
For example, Greek society—and, in particular, Athens—largely considered the birthplace of western democratic ideas, was an exclusive and extractive society. It was exclusive in terms of what citizenry meant and extractive in its use of conquered land and people as resources.
Today, in the post-industrial world, the electrical grid and internal-combustion engines have rendered human muscle as a kinetic force obsolete. Likewise, industrial machinery and assembly lines have rendered human manual dexterity obsolete for many manufacturing processes.
Without even making the moral or ethical argument that slavery is wrong—an argument that can be conveniently ignored if that society's standards of living seem to require slaves and servants—it's easy to see how modern post-industrial society would have moved away from human muscle (enslaved or not) as soon as more effective technology became available.
Therefore, much of the moral or ethical advancement in recent decades also has at its core a simple lack of need for extractive or abhorrent practices, thanks to “the best tool available” being something else entirely.
In this manner, advancements that lead to producing an abundance of goods and services at lower cost are at the very core of generating wealth for society. And those advancements, for the most part, are innovations in areas none other than the natural sciences and technology.
For the second part, it's important to note how this abundance is apportioned. In extractive societies, such as the aforementioned Greeks, the wealth flowed upwards, by design.
In a modern democracy, though, the design of institutions, with their checks and balances, have the intention of keeping leaders and decision makers very much accountable to the citizens they represent. Legitimacy flows upwards from the people through the universal vote and accountability flows downwards from the representatives to the people.
Therefore, leaders and politicians are only as good as the ability of the general public to transparently see not only the words that are spoken, but also the actions and the factual outcomes. Facts and transparency, when coupled with an informed and critically thinking public that votes according to their values and interests, is an unstoppable force of alignment and accountability between the government and the governed.
With all this in mind, let me make the argument that the world today is indeed afflicted by many bad and undesirable things, but it is measurably better than it was decades before thanks to the abundance afforded by technology and science, and the social mobility and apportionment afforded by democratic institutions.