Ecclesiastes 7:10 says "Do not say. "Why were the former days better than these?" for it is not out of wisdom that you ask this.
Yes things were much better long ago back in the days of Vlad the Impaler, and a vast array of similar people who all lived long before 1914. The estimate for the death toll during the Taiping rebellion is 44 million and that was in 1850.
Anyone who says the world is so bad now never seems able to point to a specific time that they would like to go back to, when life was so much better, I think because it does not exist.