What is Reddit's opinion of Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Library of Theological Ethics)?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I have a similar feeling so I'll take a stab.

Technological progress: yeah, we've had some (though what's been groundbreaking, rather than incremental?).

Social progress: matter of perspective; it's been great for some, terrible for others, and hard to say on net.

There's a Pinkerian sense where social progress is absolutely better, but some other sense in that... way more people are well-fed, housed, clothed, not worked to death in cotton mills, etc, but for all those gains they're still deeply unhappy, and quite possibly even less so than before. The "measurable goods" have improved massively while the "immeasurable goods" have largely faded, and have done for a long time. People gained the world and lost their soul.

I've been on a kick of reading some older books, and this feeling is part of the reason. Going through Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society or the essay collection on social alienation Man Alone, both from the 1960s, and other than some non-PC language and high-class literary references they could've been written last week. I don't have them handy to provide exact quotes, sorry.

But there's a sense in which even that's old news-

8 All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already,
in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to happen
among those who come after.

Thus was it ever, people immeasurably unsatisfied even as their lives get measurably better? Maybe so, and it's just a matter of limited perspective that we've had decades of no progress.