There is a dirty little secret about economics writing. The thing that offers the surest path to front page play for a story, to lots of Web traffic, to a pat on the back from editors is doom and gloom. When we can point out something that is awful, whether it is a collapsing job market or rising poverty, the world seems more interested in what we have to say. It’s not for nothing they call economics the dismal science.

But for Thanksgiving, this economics writer decided to cast aside the usual practice, fire up FRED (a database of economic statistics maintained by the St. Louis Fed), and keep looking until I found five trends that are unambiguously positive.

This is what I found.

• Household debt is way down. In the past three years, Americans have made remarkable progress cleaning up their balance sheets and paying down debts.

After peaking at nearly 98 percent of economic output at the start of 2009, the household debt was down to 83 percent of GDP in the spring of 2012.

That represents debt reduction of $636 billion, or more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child. It should be noted that some of the decline came about because of debt being written down (such as in mortgage foreclosures), not paid off. But the fact is that excessive household debt played a major role getting us into this mess; we’re well on our way toward fixing it.

• The cost of servicing that debt is way, way down. In late 2007, debt service payments added up to a whopping 14 percent of disposable personal income.

Now it’s down to 10.7 percent, about the same as in the early 1990s. That reflects both Americans reducing their debt burdens and ultra-low interest rate policies from the Federal Reserve that have reduced the rates paid on debts that remain.

• Electricity and natural gas prices are falling. Americans who cook or heat their homes with natural gas are seeing big savings, thanks to falling prices: The retail price for consumers’ gas service piped into their homes is down 8.4 percent in the year ended in October.

The lower wholesale price of natural gas is also pulling down electricity prices; they are off 1.2 percent over the past year. Since these are both utility costs that people can’t control much in the short-run, that translates directly into more disposable income for Americans to use for everything else they want or need to buy.

• Businesses aren’t firing people. The job market has been underwhelming in the economic recovery that officially began more than three years ago, and unemployment remains high at 7.9 percent.

But there is some hidden good news in the jobs numbers.

While businesses aren’t adding new workers at a pace that would put the hordes of unemployed back on the job very rapidly, they also aren’t slashing jobs at a very rapid clip. Private employers laid off or discharged 1.62 million people in September, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover data. That may sound like a lot, but it’s near the lowest level in the decade the data goes back.

Even in 2006, which was in theory a good year for the economy, employers slashed an average of 1.66 million workers a month.

• Housing is dramatically more affordable.

I made a simple model to look at what a typical American family would actually have to pay to buy a house over time. Assuming the person took out a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at the prevailing rate in an amount 80 percent of the median home sales price across the country. In the spring of 2006, that typical U.S. home buyer would have faced a mortgage payment of $1,247 a month, or a whopping 41 percent of the average wages of private sector workers.

But in the six years since then, home prices have fallen, so have mortgage rates, and wages have risen with inflation.

Add it up, and in the spring of 2012 that median American house would require a mortgage payment of only $889 a month, which is 26 percent of the average private sector employee’s pay.

For workers just starting out, young families or those looking to buy a bigger place, that is hard to beat.

Those five trends add up to a delicious mix.

Neil Irwin is a Washington Post columnist and economics editor of Wonkblog.