Global trends over time - apart from climate, is almost everything else about to get better?

In the ‘Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin described how a population explosion occurs. Charles was not to know it, but such circumstances arose for his own species at around the time of his own birth. However, the favourable seasons for human population growth were not experienced favourably, with times of great social dislocation from small scale enclosure to global colonisation. Now those seasons are over, we have experienced the first ever sustained slowdown in the rate of global human population growth for at least one generation. However, we are not just slowing down in terms of how many children we have, but in almost everything else we do other than the rise in global temperatures we live with. If this is true – what does it mean? And what measurements suggest it is true?