It started in my early forties, and it’s only gotten worse since then. At first, it was a mild annoyance, but now it affects my quality of life and makes it harder to get things done. I’m definitely not alone—almost every middle-aged person I know has the same problem—and maybe you do too: a condition called presbyopia, a type of age-related vision loss that makes it difficult to see things clearly at close distances.
Luckily, the condition is easily and inexpensively treated with reading glasses, widely available at nearly every corner drug store in the United States. Reading glasses work well, and they’re cheap enough that I have them stashed around my house so a pair is always in reach. But an estimated 510 to 826 million people around the world have presbyopia but do not have corrective glasses.1See Bastawrous, Kassalow, and Watts 2024. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15147_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15147_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
What we know and what we don’t know
We think that providing reading glasses to people who need them is a promising way to improve their employment opportunities and increase their economic well-being. It makes intuitive sense that being able to see better would improve people’s ability to work, particularly for vision-intensive jobs such as crop cultivation and inspection, manufacturing, or retail work.
We’ve looked at two studies of programs that distribute reading glasses—one of tea pickers in India and one of workers in a variety of vision-intensive occupations in Bangladesh, such as tailors and carpenters—and they both suggest that distributing reading glasses has a positive economic effect for the people who receive glasses.2Reddy et al. 2018, Sehrin et al. 2024. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15147_1_2’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15147_1_2’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Based on those studies, we think it’s likely that providing workers with reading glasses would be a cost-effective use of funding. However, we’re uncertain about how cost-effective it would be, as the studies don’t provide all the information we need.
For example, the study in India was only 11 weeks long, so it wasn’t able to assess the effect of having reading glasses over a longer time frame. It focused on productivity,