For most Americans, these feel like bleak times. But ... under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries - and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn. But many of us aren't aware of ways the world is getting better because the press - and humans in general - have a strongnegativity bias. Bad economic news gets more coverage than good news. Negative experiences affect people more, and for longer, than positive ones.Survey evidenceconsistently indicates that few people in rich countries have any clue that the world has taken a happier turn in recent decades - one poll in 2016 found thatonly 8 percentof US residents knew that global poverty had fallen since 1996. It's worth paying some attention to this huge progress. Nothing's permanent, and big challenges ... remain, but the world is getting much, much better on a variety of important, underappreciated dimensions. Probably the most important [is] ahuge declinein the share of the world population living on less than $1.90 a day, from nearly 35 percent in 1987 to under 11 percent in 2013.