“New calculations by the Global Education Monitoring Report reveal that 50 million more girls have been enrolled in school globally since 2015. There are also 5 million more girls completing each level of education from primary to upper secondary education.”
From UNESCO.
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
Blog Post | Health & Medical Care
Summary: Vaping can help America quit smoking, a habit that causes millions of deaths and diseases each year. This article presents evidence that vaping improves public health and criticizes the regulations that hinder vaping’s life-saving potential.
Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the sale of the Vuse Solo, a first-of-its-kind acknowledgment that ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery system) products have a positive impact on public health.
According to the FDA’s Technical Project Lead Review, “studies have shown that daily ENDS use is associated with significant reductions in combusted cigarette use.” The review also suggests that devices like the Vuse Solo are much less toxic than cigarettes, greatly reduce smokers’ exposure to carcinogens, and appeal mainly to cigarette-using individuals.
In short, more vaping means less cigarette smoking, and that’s a good thing for public health. According to one study, if every U.S. smoker switched to e-cigarettes, it would prevent between 1.6 and 6.6 million premature deaths, depending on the long-term risks of e-cigarette use and the number of non-smokers who begin vaping.
Thankfully, smoking is in decline. In 2019, the CDC reported 13.1 million fewer adult smokers than in 1995. Additionally, data suggests that cigarette use has also plummeted among high schoolers. According to a survey from the University of Michigan, the rate at which teens are smoking has been cut by two-thirds over the last decade. The study found only 4.2% of respondents used cigarettes in 2020, down from 12.8% ten years prior.
With the new FDA acknowledgment, the vaping industry may finally be able to take some credit for this reduction.
Unfortunately, FDA regulations still undermine the vaping industry. The process by which companies must seek FDA authorization is prohibitive to innovation and hazardous to health. Up until a vape product receives premarket authorization from the FDA, it cannot be bought or sold in the U.S. Applications for authorization closed last year, and the grace period for removing vapes from shelves ended in September. In other words, the vaping industry is in legal limbo until the FDA concludes its review of premarket applications.
These regulations limit current sales and reduce the vaping industry’s long-run desire to innovate. Each new vape product brought to market must submit its own premarket authorization application. This means even minor improvements to a device will cost vape companies a significant amount of time and money, disincentivizing innovation.
While the FDA authorized the Vuse Solo in the Tobacco flavor, the agency rejected premarket authorization for several other products in the Vuse family on the grounds that their e-liquid varieties may attract teenagers. Regulatory scrutiny of flavored tobacco products started back in 2018 when the Surgeon General issued an advisory against “kid friendly flavors,” and the Trump administration banned the sale of all closed-system e-liquid pods, except for tobacco flavored products.
Since then, as the CDC’s most recent National Youth Tobacco Survey suggests, electronic cigarette use among teens has decreased to 11.3%, whereas just two years prior, the percent-use among teens was 27.5%.
Tighter flavor controls, however, may not be causing this drop in teen vaping. Although companies no longer produce closed-system pods in non-tobacco flavors (the type prohibited under regulations from the Trump administration), selling disposable vapes and refillable e-liquid products is still permitted in non-tobacco varieties. According to the CDC survey, disposable vapes were the most attractive for high schoolers in 2021, meaning teens accessed flavored products even when the government tried to prohibit them.
So, if the government isn’t stopping youth vaping, who is? One explanation may be that the initial cohort of teens toying with vapes is no longer teenaged. The National Youth Tobacco Survey only looks at high school-aged individuals. The group that would have taken the survey during the spike in 2018 is now in college and no longer qualifies. Additionally, information about the harms of adolescent nicotine exposure has been widely circulated through a targeted campaign of online public service announcements from various interest groups, which likely contributed to the overall decrease in teen vaping.
Extensively regulating ENDS products isn’t conducive to improvement in U.S. smoking rates. In fact, by inefficiently regulating the vaping market, the government is impeding America’s opportunity to quit its smoking habit.
The Human Progress Podcast | Ep. 12
Twenty years ago this week – on Indian Republic Day, 26 January 2000 – I wandered into the slums behind the Charminar, in the Old City of Hyderabad, and my life changed forever.
Building on my PhD at what is now the UCL Institute of Education, I had become an expert on private education. Twenty years ago, everyone knew that private education was just for the elite and upper middle classes and I was in India doing consultancy work for the International Finance Corporation, the private arm of the World Bank, evaluating the elite private schools in the area. However, for whatever reason I had always felt that my life should be about serving less privileged communities.
So, on a day off from consultancy, I went into Hyderabad’s slums, down an alleyway and found a small school in a residential building. It wasn’t a state school, but a low-cost private one, charging in those days about $1 a month. Then I found another, and another, and soon I was connected to a federation of 500 of these low-cost private schools, serving poor and low-income communities across the region. I spent as much time as I could in these schools after finishing my daily meetings in the elite colleges that had initially brought me to Hyderabad. I watched lesson after lesson and witnessed young energetic teachers educating classrooms full of children, often in extremely impressive ways.
I remember going back to my hotel room in an upmarket part of the city and thinking that maybe the different parts of my life could fit together after all. I was an expert in private education, and in India private education seemed as much about the poor and disadvantaged as anyone. My life felt suddenly complete.
For many years I ploughed a lonely furrow, trying to convince those with power and influence that private education was good for the poor. Now, 20 years later, the extraordinary, disruptive revolution of low-cost private schools that is sweeping across the developing world is increasingly acknowledged, and sometimes even respected.
In both urban slums and rural villages, poorer parents are abandoning public schools en masse and sending their children to low-cost private schools, typically created by educational entrepreneurs. These private schools are ubiquitous. In Lagos State, Nigeria, for instance, there are 14,000 low-cost private schools, enrolling 2.12 million children, some 70% of preschool and primary aged children. Research from Nairobi (Kenya), Kampala (Uganda) and Accra (Ghana) gives similar results – the highest percentage is in Kampala, where 84% of primary aged children in poor areas are in private education.
Similarly, in urban India at least 70% of children are in independent private schools, while the comprehensive Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) shows 30% of rural children in private schools, a figure that is growing each year. Extrapolation from recent studies indicates there are roughly 92 million children in India who attend around 450,000 low-cost private schools.
The private schools are better than the state schools, where there is a lack of accountability; research has shown teachers in state schools typically teach only half of the time they are meant to. It’s no surprise that a review by the Department for International Development found children in low-cost private schools outperforming those in public schools, even after controlling for socio-economic background variables.
The private schools don’t typically suffer from gender bias and are affordable, even for families on the poverty line. And the majority of low-cost private schools are run as small businesses by educational entrepreneurs (with a minority run by religious organisations and charities), without subsidies from the state or philanthropic organisation. This means that low-cost private schools are already a fully sustainable solution to the problem of improving educational standards for all.
But there are still difficulties to be overcome. Sometimes governments try to close these schools altogether. More commonly they pass regulations that impose impossible conditions, such as the need for very large playgrounds in areas of urban overcrowding, or the insistence that all teachers must achieve the same level of certification and pay as their government counterparts, even though this would make it impossible for the schools to charge low fees.
So, the struggle continues. The work that began for me 20 years ago in the slums of India continues to this day. I’m currently building a team at the University of Buckingham to continue to champion the successes of low-cost private schools globally. Providing burdensome government regulation doesn’t get in the way, low-cost private schools and the education they provide for millions of poor children will continue to thrive.
This originally appeared in CapX.
