Alvin Chang | Vox

Why 25% of teens can’t answer this question

2023-05-17T12:52:00-04:00

Every few years, thousands of teenagers are asked a very simple question: What job do you expect to have when you’re 30?

It’s an important question because having an answer helps teenagers plan for the future, whether that’s taking a specific class or deciding to attend college. That’s why the OECD’s PISA survey has asked this question since 2000.

But in the last 20 years, we’ve seen a concerning trend: More and more teenagers name the same basic jobs, like doctor or lawyer, almost as if they’re picking jobs out of a children’s book. And even more worrisome is that more and more teenagers don’t even name a job.

All of this hints that today’s teenagers aren’t thinking enough about their future plans — and, fair or not, this lack of career preparation will likely have lifelong consequences.

Sources and further reading:

This OECD report argues that the narrowing answers to this question hint that teens are confused about their future careers.
The PISA survey data is difficult to work with, but the codebook provides broad summaries of the data.
This study shows that students with science-related ambitions are far more likely to get science or engineering degrees, even if they aren’t as good at math.
This paper looks at the long-term ramifications of being “misaligned” as a teenager.
If you’re a solutions-oriented person, this OECD report is about what we can do to help teenagers better think about their professional futures.

You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

How South Koreans got so much taller

2023-02-23T11:50:50-05:00

A century ago, humans were quite short. For example, the average South Korean woman was about 4-foot-7, or 142 centimeters, while the average American woman was about 5-foot-2, or 159 centimeters. Humans were fairly short by today’s standards, and that was true throughout nearly all of human history.

But in the past century, human heights have skyrocketed. Globally, humans grew an average of about 3 inches, but in South Korea, women grew an astounding 8 inches and men grew 6 inches on average. So what exactly happened?

Researchers have tried to pinpoint how much of human height can be attributed to genetics, and how much of it is swayed by our environment. One study of British and Welsh World War I soldiers found that growing up in an environment with better nutrition and less disease led to noticeable height differences in adulthood. Later, researchers started studying siblings and twins and found that about 20 percent of their height differences can be attributed to their environment.

Genetics determine how tall we can potentially get during puberty, but throughout most of human history, that growth was stunted. In the past 100 years, though, the average human has had significantly better nutrition and health. In turn, we got taller.

South Korea is a unique example. In the early part of the 20th century, South Korea was a poor and hungry country. But drastic economic growth fueled improved living conditions:

The country’s GDP per capita went from around $158 in 1960 to about $35,000 in 2021, according to World Bank data — in line with affluent European countries.
The country’s food supply was about 2,100 calories per person in 1961, in line with the average low-income country. By 2013, each person had about 1,200 additional calories available, according to data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
UN data also shows us that more than 20 percent of South Korean infants died before age 1 in 1950, but now it’s about 0.2 percent.

However, South Korea’s improved living conditions are a harsh contrast to North Korea. For half of the 20th century, the south and north were one country. Heights in those two regions were nearly identical. So what happened to human height in North Korea after an authoritarian regime took over and closed off its borders?

More reading:

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, by economist Gregory Clark, beautifully connects economic conditions to human living conditions.
This Scientific American article by molecular biologist Chao-Qiang Lai breaks down the research on how much of human height can be attributed to genetics and how much is environmental.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has some of my favorite data sets. Understanding what humans eat — and how that’s changed over time — gives us insights into everything from economics to biodiversity.
There are many data sets on human heights over time, but the one I used in this video is from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

How to squirrel-proof the power grid

2020-01-06T08:57:07-05:00

For the past century, we’ve powered our world using the same basic model. Power is generated from large power plants, sent down transmission lines, and eventually delivered to the end user. But this has meant that something as small as a squirrel can cause massive blackouts. In fact, this happens all the time.

It’s not just squirrels. Wildfires and storms can also cause massive blackouts. And it’s because we rely on this centralized power system.

But there is a better way to power the world: a decentralized system, where power is no longer just generated from big power plants. Rather, it’s a system where homes, neighborhoods, and even military bases generate their own power, and can send that power back up into the larger grid. This means there isn’t just a single point of failure, and it also makes it much easier to incorporate greener sources of energy.

These are called microgrids.

This isn’t the most intuitive thing to understand, which is why we worked with Vox energy reporter Umair Irfan to explain this system, using candy and construction paper.

To read more about microgrids, check out this piece on how microgrids work, and this piece on how microgrids could’ve protected against blackouts during the California wildfires.

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Who pays the lowest taxes in the US?

2019-12-20T09:32:02-05:00

A “fun” piece of tax trivia — if there even is one — is that nearly half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes. It’s something you’ll hear from conservative pundits, often to make the point that poor people aren’t paying their fair share in taxes.

The easy rebuttal is that there are several other taxes in the US — many of which put a bigger burden on poor people than rich people. But a recent analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, as presented in their book, found that poor people may be paying nearly the same portion of their income in taxes as rich people. In their New York Times op-ed, they called America’s system a “giant flat tax.”

You might think it’s pretty easy to figure out who’s paying the government taxes. But let’s take the payroll tax, for example. You pay 7.65 percent out of your paycheck — and your employer also pays another 7.65 percent. However, economists have found that employers pay that tax by taking it out of workers’ wages. That’s simple enough, but figuring out who actually pays something like corporate taxes is way harder, and it relies on some assumptions. This is why the Saez and Zucman analysis has caused quite the debate among economists. (Vox’s Matt Yglesias explains what some economists disagree with.)

In our video, we used Saez and Zucman’s data to walk through the basics of the various taxes we pay, and how much each income group ends up paying. While not all economists agree on the exact numbers, most of them would agree that poor people do pay a pretty large share of their earnings toward taxes.

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

How online ratings make good schools look bad

2019-12-04T11:06:03-05:00

In America, most children go to school based on where their family lives. So affluent parents often take the quality of schools into consideration when they make housing decisions.

It can be hard to determine the quality of a school, though. Parents can use test scores as an indicator, or they can do their own research within their own social networks. But eventually they find data through Google or the real estate website Zillow. And there, they’ll almost certainly run into a website called GreatSchools.org.

And GreatSchools makes it easy: Almost every school in America is rated, 1 to 10. But what do these scores measure?

To find out, we collaborated with the education news website Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat reporters Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee found that these ratings correlate highly with socioeconomic levels — while not doing a great job at capturing how much a school helps students grow.

In their excellent piece, they explain:

But GreatSchools’ ratings effectively penalize schools that serve largely low-income students and those serving largely black and Hispanic students, generally giving them significantly lower ratings than schools serving more affluent, whiter student bodies, a Chalkbeat analysis found. …

The result is a ubiquitous, privately run school ratings system that is steering people toward whiter, more affluent schools.

To find out why, watch the video at the top of this piece and read Chalkbeat’s in-depth piece. And to keep up with Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

The man who rigged America’s election maps

2020-09-25T09:43:58-04:00

For most of his life, few people knew Thomas Hofeller’s name.

But for decades, Hofeller was the Republican Party’s most influential mapmaker. When it came time to redraw districts, Hofeller not only knew how to churn the data and work with the software — but he also knew exactly how this power could be used.

In 1991, Hofeller said, “I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today.”

Then a decade later, he said, “Redistricting is like an election in reverse. It’s a great event. Usually the voters get to pick the politicians. In redistricting, the politicians get to pick the voters.”

Perhaps his greatest work was in his late years. In 2010, after Republicans took over several statehouses, Hofeller helped redraw several statehouse maps, including the maps in North Carolina.

Gerrymandering has been around for centuries, but in that redistricting cycle, Hofeller tested the limits of exactly how much power one party can accrue — without actually having a majority of the electorate support them. When the Supreme Court struck down his maps for diluting the voting power of black people, Hofeller drew another round of maps that diluted the political power of Democrats.

But in 2018, Hofeller died. Shortly thereafter, his daughter found thousands of his documents. And it turns out those documents are key to fixing the structural “vote stealing” Hofeller spent his life perfecting.

More reading:

My colleague Ella Nilsen wrote an excellent story during the 2018 midterm elections about the gerrymandered North Carolina districts. A few months later, the Supreme Court ruled that gerrymandering was outside their authority — something Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote was a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump. Shortly thereafter, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered maps. Vox’s Ian Millhiser writes that this case, and other state cases, show the “cracks” in the Republican Party “gerrymandering firewall.”
This Powerpoint presentation Hofeller gave to state leaders is revealing. Hofeller told people to keep files secure. Turns out he wasn’t heeding his own advice.
One of the best books on modern gerrymandering is Ratf**ked by David Daley. He’s looked through some of Hofeller’s files and found an email where — shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer and a kidney tumor — Hofeller wrote, “I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit.”

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel, where I will continue to cover some of the key policy and politics stories leading up to the 2020 election.

The phone call that could get Trump impeached

2019-11-25T17:22:19-05:00

The impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump started with a phone call.

There isn’t much dispute over what was said in the phone call, because Trump’s White House released a rough transcript. That document shows that Trump’s transgressions are quite simple.

According to the CIA officer who wrote a whistleblower report, “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

This phone call started as a routine conversation between world leaders. Trump was calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose party had just won the parliamentary election. But things took a turn when Trump asked Zelensky for a few favors. Most notably, he wanted Zelensky to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, who is the leading candidate to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.

Simple enough.

But things get complicated when we dig into what Trump wants Zelensky to investigate — because it has to do with a conspiracy theory Trump has peddled.

The theory is that, when Biden was vice president, he pushed to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired. This much is true, and Biden says as much; Shokin did not crack down on rampant corruption in Ukraine, and US leaders — including the Obama administration, top Democrats, and several Republican senators — wanted Shokin fired. But Trump has a theory that Biden pushed for Shokin to be fired because Shokin was investigating a company called Burisma — a company Biden’s son, Hunter, worked for.

The very short version of this is: Ukraine’s top prosecutor was fired for not investigating corruption, but Trump is pushing a theory that he was fired for … investigating corruption.

Once we get through all the confusion Trump has introduced, we get back to the simple thing Trump did wrong: He asked a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent.

To get an even clearer idea of how simple this scandal is, watch the video at the top of this story. And to watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Listen to Today, Explained

Our podcast explains how Ukraine finds itself at the center of the American political drama, yet President Trump is the least of the country’s worries.

Looking for a quick way to keep up with the never-ending news cycle? Host Sean Rameswaram will guide you through the most important stories at the end of each day.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Over cast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The chart that predicts recessions

2019-09-04T14:38:23-04:00

A recession might be coming. Some investors believe it’s on the way because there’s a chart that has predicted every recession in the past half-century — and it’s starting to predict another one.

The chart visualizes the amount of money you can make on US bonds.

When the government wants to borrow money, it can sell bonds. It’s basically an agreement saying that if you give the government money now, they’ll pay you back — with interest. But here’s the important part: The longer you agree to let the government keep your money, the higher the interest rate. So you make more money.

That’s why this chart usually points upward, like this:

This is called the “yield curve.” But sometimes, this chart does something like this:

This is what investors call “inversion.” It isn’t normal.

In fact, shortly before every recession in the past half-century, this is what happened. And it happened again in August 2019.

In the video above, we set out to do three basic things:

Visualize the yield curve for every month in the past half-century, to show just how much predictive power it has.
Explain why the curve inverts.
And explain why the inversion has preceded so many recessions.

But the really short version is: It’s treated as a thermometer for how investors are feeling about the economy two years out. And when investors aren’t feeling great about it, sometimes it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy — and help bring on a recession.

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel. And drop me an email if there’s something you’d like to see explained with cartoons, data viz, or diagram — alvin@vox.com.

Why video games aren’t causing America’s gun problem, in one chart

2019-08-07T20:11:18-04:00

Republican leaders are again saying video games are the problem.

After two deadly mass shootings over the weekend in Ohio and Texas, which killed more than 30 people thus far, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that “video games that dehumanize individuals” are the problem.

There is plenty of research debunking video games as the cause. But since McCarthy and other Republicans continue to blame video games, here’s a simple chart showing the top video game–consuming countries and the number of violent gun deaths in each of them.

One of these countries is an outlier.

There is research showing violent video games can make people more physically aggressive — but this is true of people in all countries, not just the US.

But the story isn’t that Republicans are blaming video games. Rather, it’s that they’re blaming anything other than lax guns laws and the huge number of firearms in this country.

Correction: A previous version of the chart, above, had South Korea and China as the two countries with the most per capita video game revenue, with Japan in tenth position.

Listen to this

Vox’s German Lopez explains why Democrats need a bold new plan for gun control:

News comes at you fast. Join us at the end of your day to understand it. You can listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

All student debt in the US, visualized

2019-08-06T09:03:13-04:00

Americans hold an astounding amount of student debt: $1.6 trillion. It’s a number that has been increasing exponentially over the past several decades.

This is why Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have ambitious plans to cancel debt. Sanders wants to cancel all of it; Warren wants to cancel all debt for households earning under $100,000 a year — and, above that, phase out the amount of debt canceled until a household reaches $250,000.

For both Sanders and Warren, debt cancellation is part of a larger plan to make public college free. Paying for college wasn’t as big of a problem for Americans who went to school before the 1990s. But in recent decades, the cost of college has skyrocketed.

In turn, the amount of loans students take out has also increased:

Both Warren and Sanders argue that our economy has made a college degree necessary, so these huge debts essentially become the cost of entering the middle class.

But even progressives have concerns about a one-time cancellation of all student debt. That’s because this $1.6 trillion infusion doesn’t exactly go to help people who need it most.

In the video above, I visualize all the student debt in America — and figure out who would benefit from debt cancellation.

To watch more Vox videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel.