What are you basing that on?
Think about the quality of life that was common back then. In 1900, even someone in the richest 1%:
-Lived to around 55
-Had primitive medicine
-Barely any electricity
-No radios or other sophisticated methods of communication
-No sophisticated methods of travel
-Incredibly limited access to information/knowledge
I'd much prefer to be at the 25th% today, where despite not being as rich comparatively, you:
-Live to around 75
-Have access to, at worst, basic modern medicine
-The internet/iphones/skype/etc.
-Planes/Cars
-Access to any information you want
I dunno. Better to be Rockefeller or some modern American scraping by living paycheck to paycheck? Hard to say. For our good American lad, yes, there are far greater medical technologies in existence today, but they aren't available to him. There are far better methods of transportation, but he can't afford to use them, nor does he have any time off work to go anywhere or do anything.
Rockefeller had access to the best transportation of his day and could go wherever he wanted. Rocky Had access to the best (albeit primitive) medical treatment of his day. Point of fact Rockefeller lived to be 97.
Rocky didn't have to worry much about debt, the modern American does. Rockefeller owned an empire and had incredible political power. The modern American owns nothing but debt and (if we're still talking about the bottom 25% here) has no institutional political power whatsoever. Americans in the bottom 25% do not go where they want or do what they want to, but go where and do what they have to. Rockefeller was free to do what he pleased. It's a bit different as Rockefeller was high up in that 1%, but that is his circle of friends we're speaking of.
Oh, and Iphones and Ipods and skype are swell, I love them as much as anyone, but they are feeble substitutes for the economic solvency and individual autonomy that we lack completely.
All that being said, of course we are better off after industrialization. Capitalist industrialization eliminated any and all need of material want. There is no even marginally rational justification for hunger, poverty, death by curable disease, homelessness or inhumane working conditions left in the world. Industrial capitalism raised levels of production and technology to levels that could easily abolish all of these things. The problem of course is that the Rockefellers and Carnegies of our day continue to pursue accumulation of their own wealth even when it is the only remaining cause of these horrors. The problem is that this primitive accumulation has become not an aid to, but a hindrance to creativity, human freedom and indeed, even production in a meaningful sense.
In spite of the hideousness of life under Capitalism today, there will come a day when people seize the means of production and begin to build a world free of starvation and the other idiocies described above. And it is no doubt industrialization that laid the seeds that made that possible.