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The Guardian - AU

World

Nick Evershed and Josh Nicholas

The Crunch: the dangers of taller cars and measuring inflation with tomato soup

Inflation The Crunch Campbell (Organization) Greg Jericho Australia

Composite image showing a cutout of a white SUV, a container ship, and a can of Campbell's tomato soup overlaid on a chart with numbers — Disrupted shipping routes due to Houthi attacks, large cars and Campbell’s soup have their data analysed in this edition of The Crunch. Composite: Reuters / Getty Images

Welcome to the second edition of The Crunch for 2024!

Our video series is on hiatus until February, but we still have our regular round-up of the most interesting and important charts from the last fortnight.

In this week’s newsletter, we have the impact on global shipping from Houthi rebel attacks, measuring inflation with cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, our very first chart from a peer-reviewed journal 🎉 showing how taller cars are more likely to kill pedestrians, how the proliferation of cricket leagues is squeezing more games into a crowded global calendar, how AI might help us to understand animal communication and more charts than you can poke a stick at about tax cuts in Australia.

Five charts from the fortnight

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1. How the Houthi rebel attacks have upended global shipping

The image is a map illustrating changes in shipping routes before and after attacks in a specific area. It highlights several key locations such as Europe, Asia, Africa, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Malacca Strait, and the Cape of Good Hope. There are two different coloured lines representing the shipping routes: one colour for routes before attacks and another colour for routes after attacks. A box labelled “Area of Houthi attacks” is prominently displayed near the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. There’s a circle around a section of the map with the label “Continued traffic,” and another label near the Cape of Good Hope that reads “Ships diverted after attacks,” indicating a significant change in shipping traffic due to the attacks. The Indian Ocean is also marked on the map. The lines show a dense network of routes converging and diverging at various ports and straits, with a clear shift in patterns due to the attacks.

This excellent visual feature by the New York Times (paywalled) shows how Houthi attacks on cargo ships passing through the Gulf of Aden have resulted in a large amount of ship traffic taking a lengthy detour around the Cape of Good Hope.

It also covers the inflationary effect of the disruption, though shipping costs have yet to hit the highs we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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2. Cricket is too (?) popular

Chart showing a rectangle in every year for every Twenty20 league game around the world, the calendar gets increasingly congested as time goes on — Short form cricket leagues are proliferating Illustration: Guardian Design/ESPNcricinfo

Australia’s Big Bash tournament was shortened this year but still saw key players leave before it ended to play in other T20 leagues overseas. We took a look at how leagues are proliferating around the world, shrinking the Big Bash’s window (click through for the interactive version of the chart).

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3. SUVs are more dangerous than regular cars, in part because of the higher fronts

A chart depicting the percent increase in risk of pedestrian death associated with different types of vehicles, specifically Full-size SUVs, Pickups, Compact SUVs, and Vans. The y-axis represents the percent increase, ranging from -50 to 200 percent, while the x-axis lists the vehicle types. Each vehicle type has a point estimate shown by a diamond symbol, and a horizontal line representing the 95% confidence interval of that estimate. Full-size SUVs show the highest point estimate, with a significant confidence interval suggesting a strong increase in risk. The chart notes that full-size SUVs are shown to increase the risk of a pedestrian death by 99%, conditional on collision characteristics. — Change in probability of pedestrian death relative to cars. Photograph: Justin Tyndall/Economics of Transportation

This chart is from a new article in the journal Economics of Transportation, and it shows the increased probability of pedestrian death after being struck by the vehicles listed, relative to a car. The paper itself is very interesting, as the author, Justin Tyndall, was able to link crash data with actual vehicle measurements and demonstrate that the increased risk of death for pedestrians is strongly related to the higher fronts of SUVs and utility vehicles (also known as pickup trucks, or utes).

This chart is our first from a peer-reviewed journal, which we (OK, maybe just Nick) are excited about! There are so many great charts in journal papers that rarely make it out of academic circles, and we’d really like to share more charts that neatly summarise interesting research like this.

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4. A bigger tax cut for people on low and middle incomes in Australia

A line chart showing the modified stage-three tax cuts will benefit lower incomes more than the already-legislated tax cuts. — A line chart showing the impact of the modified stage-three tax cuts. Photograph: Greg Jericho/Guardian Australia

The Australian government has announced changes to the already-legislated stage-three tax cuts that were passed by the Coalition government in 2019. This chart from our colleague Greg Jericho shows how the proposed changes mean taxpayers on lower and middle incomes will see a greater benefit than under the previous plan, even as all taxpayers still see a tax cut. Those on the highest incomes will see their tax cut reduced.

You can also see our summary chart and tables of how the new stage-three cuts will affect people on different income levels here.

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5. How AI might help us understand animal communication

A chart showing a spectrograph for Elephant’s rumble, human speech, and bat chirps, with lines indicating which sections are outside normal human hearing — A chart showing a spectrograph for Elephant’s rumble, human speech and bat chirps, with lines indicating which sections are outside normal human hearing. Photograph: Financial Times

This fascinating feature from the Financial Times (paywalled) delves into how researchers and tech entrepreneurs are teaming up to attempt to use the same technology behind ChatGPT to try to create a translator for animal communication.

There are some great graphics in here which combine audio and visual representation of sound frequencies, and also an excellent explanation of how large language models can be used to translate languages without any understanding of word meanings.

Spotlight on … SUVs and road safety

European cars have gotten 1cm wider every two years over the past two decades thanks to ever more SUVs
Large cars also dominated the list of top-selling vehicles in Australia in 2023 (check out our video on this topic!)
No SUVs, but check out this piece from the NYT’s Upshot on why there are more pedestrian deaths in the US than there used to be

Off the Charts

A line chart showing the price of a can of Campbells soup since 1898. The line is mostly flat for the 20th century and really takes off in the 1980s — The price of a Campbell’s tomato soup can since 1898 Photograph: politicalcalculations.com

Campbell’s condensed tomato soup costs about 12.5 times more in January 2024 than it did in January 1898, according to this analysis of newspapers and advertisements. Campbell’s soup is a great indicator of inflation over time due to its ubiquity in American grocery stores and because it has changed little over time.