Sounds like oversimplification. However, it seems like most things we discuss here boil down to a single and deleterious consequence: emotional neglect of children. By emotional neglect, it can be absent parents due to selfish reasons, high expectations place upon the child and an invalidating home environment. Among those things that I can think that we discuss here (feminism, ginocracy, decadence, idiocracy, etc)

Past: Father working 40h is able to afford a decent standard of living for a three people (wife + 2 children). We produced good quality and lasting products.

Now: two parents overworking 40h+ each, children getting earlier and spending more time in socialist public schools because there is less money to pay for a private school. Less money to spend due to higher taxation and increasing inflation. It is more rational to export industries and jobs China and India because the economical "burden" of keeping them here. Products became cheap and increasingly disposable.

Past: People were more eager to sacrifice their potential to their offspring. More christian values. Less useless formal education, more contact with nature, less virtual distractions. Personal transactions more frequent (and therefore more community obligations that curbed selfish attitudes).

Now: Narcissism is rampant. More secularism. Less contact with real-world. Children are born without hope of upward mobility. More virtual transactions.

I can keep on enumerating but you get the idea. Definitely things were not perfect in past but lets assume that they worked much better on average.

Edit: formatting.