Steven Pinker opens by presenting extensive data demonstrating genuine, measurable human progress across numerous dimensions — health, wealth, safety, education — arguing this progress is substantial but widely underappreciated amid pervasive pessimistic narratives.

Why Pinker argues this progress goes underappreciated:

• Media coverage and public discourse tend to emphasize negative events and ongoing problems, which are inherently more attention-grabbing than gradual, cumulative positive trends
• Cognitive biases (like availability bias, which weights vivid recent events more heavily than gradual statistical trends) contribute to this systematic underappreciation of genuine progress
• Pinker's extensive data compilation across many specific measurable domains aims to counter this pessimism with concrete, quantifiable evidence

This opening establishes the book's core empirical thesis and its explanation for why this genuine progress often goes unrecognized in public discourse.