AFTER EDIT: I am curious about the initial pattern of upvotes and downvotes in this thread. I'm especially curious about whether anyone disagrees with any of the factual points of view I have expressed here, and particularly if anyone has any authoritative source to prove me wrong about anything I have said here. I like to learn. I'll leave the rest of this comment just as it was when it was first posted, and invite everyone's learned comments.

The article notes, "Many Americans, for instance, are convinced that 'half of all marriages end in divorce,'" but that was somewhat of an exaggeration even at the time of peak divorce rates. The statistical fallacy that prompted that mistaken belief was comparing the rate of new divorces each year to the rate of new first marriages each year, ignoring the tens of millions of people who were already married and who stayed married.

A federal government survey, "First Marriages in the United States: Data From the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth" (March 22, 2012)

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf

which may or may not have focused particularly on this issue, projects,

"In 2006–2010, the probability of a first marriage lasting at least 10 years was 68% for women and 70% for men. Looking at 20 years, the probability that the first marriages of women and men will survive was 52% for women and 56% for men in 2006–2010. These levels are virtually identical to estimates based on vital statistics from the early 1970s (24). For women, there was no significant change in the probability of a first marriage lasting 20 years between the 1995 NSFG (50%) and the 2006–2010 NSFG (52%) (Table 5). The remainder of first marriages that ended within a 20-year period were dissolved by divorce, separation, or rarely, by death."

The study also notes that marriages have a higher probability of lasting longer if both members of the couple have higher levels of education rather than lower, and were married a year or more before the birth of their first child.

Here is an article that explains the commonplace statistical fallacy:

"Divorce Rate: It's Not as High as You Think" New York Times (April 19, 2005)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/19divo.html

". . . . In 2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

"But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will."

On other points mentioned in the article and other comments here, work hours have certainly not gone down to the level predicted when I was a child, when rising productivity was predicted to cut the typical work week to as few as twenty hours per week. Instead, personal consumption has gone up to levels unimaginable in the 1960s, with many people flying on jets to vacations in foreign countries, and houses being larger than they have ever been, and cars more powerful and luxurious (and fuel-efficient) than ever before. Americans still work a lot to keep up with the Joneses, and workers in other countries still work almost as much as what has long defined "full-time" employment in law, but people now regard as routine daily spending purchases that once would have been deemed luxuries.

From the article: "The media are heavily biased toward extreme events, and they are slightly biased toward negative events -- though in their defense, that bias may just be a reflection of the human brain's propensity to focus more on negative information than positive, a trait extensively documented by neuroscience and psychology studies." This probably is the most economical explanation for why many people don't notice much of the gradual progress they have enjoyed in their lifetimes. Human cognitive biases run in the direction of noticing and focusing on problems (for good evolutionary reasons), and lack of problems fades into the background and is not noticed.