We'll never stop complaining (nor should we). Because we're not perfect, there's always more to work on. But it's important to recognize that we've improved.
Because of these two trends — richer information about abuses and changing standards for what constitutes an abuse — human rights reports released today may sound as dire as those from earlier decades, even in cases where the underlying practices have actually improved. So, when scholars convert those reports into numeric scales, countries that have made significant gains may appear to have stalled or even regressed.
...According to Fariss’s best estimates, once we account for these underlying changes in the information available and standards applied, we see that practices on many of the human rights tracked by existing data sets have improved significantly since the early 1980s. On some issues, such as political imprisonment, Fariss finds that there hasn’t been much change. On other core concerns, however, including torture and political killing, the adjusted data show substantial gains over the past 30 years. So, the trajectory varies across issues and countries, but in most cases the arc has continued to bend toward a better world.