Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.
In the US in the 1900's 60 % of people were employed on the farms. Today it's less than 1%. If you told people back then that this would happen they wouldn't have believed it. If you told them we would have therapy, massages and spas that played important parts in our lives they would've have believed us.