From our president: How's that again?

I recently had to explain to a teenager about busy signals. She had never heard one and thought the phone was broken; all of her friends have call waiting. Ah, progress.

I've been rereading my past columns, and it strikes me that we've seen much progress, some progress, and no progress at all, depending on the issue.

Doing a 180

In 2002, a reader sent us a notice from her credit-card company that said, "We will see what the index rate for your Account (the 1 month LIBOR Rate) was on the immediately preceding Determination Date as that rate and Date are defined in your Agreement." She had no idea what her interest rate would be.

No longer. The Credit Card Act, now 5 years old, requires plain-language disclosures and bans unfair interest-rate increases. An October 2013 government report found that the law helped reduce the total cost of credit to consumers by 2 percentage points.

Start your engines

In 2002 I bemoaned vehicles' lousy fuel economy. Cars had to get 27.5 mpg, and light trucks (including SUVs), 20.7 mpg. "Allowing light trucks to meet less stringent requirements no longer makes sense," I wrote, and pushed for higher standards.

We're getting there. By the 2025 model year, cars and light-duty trucks must just about double in efficiency. We're already seeing gains on our test track, with more-efficient engines, improved transmissions, and more diesels. Electric cars are no longer, as we said in 2002, "a long way off."

Hit replay

In 2006, I wrote that the maker of insomnia drug Lunesta had spent millions on its luna-moth advertising. "Butterflies may be free, but moths aren't," I said. The ads worked: Americans spent about $329 million in one year on the drug.

We didn't like direct-to-consumer drug ads then, and we still don't. They drive up health care costs, overstate the value of pills, and underplay the dangers of new drugs that aren't time-tested. An analysis of TV drug ads published in 2013 found that more than half of the claims are potentially misleading and that 10 percent are out-and-out false. Some progress.