Dear reader,
Over the past few months, as we’ve heard from numerous voices about numbers that have much to tell us about our world, there is one voice that, behind the scenes, has quietly been shaping these explorations.
Anna Venarchik has been a key editor guiding the format and approach of this weekly newsletter from the start, helping us select topics and working with reporters to understand what we should know about those topics. Soon, she will take on a new assignment at The New York Times, so I thought I’d ask her to share with us what has stood out.
After we hear from Anna, we’ll pose our questions, as usual, to you.
— Matt Thompson
Which indicator surprised you the most?
The Headway team has spent a lot of time considering transit. For years now, it has felt as if urban planners, real estate moguls and wellness influencers have been pushing the benefits of walkable cities, and have promoted street designs that prioritize pedestrians over cars.
So when we took on the topic of traffic fatalities, I was surprised to learn that the number of people dying in car crashes rose in recent years. I had expected vehicles to become safer because of advancements in car technology. But we learned that design trends were actually contributing to the problem. Autobesity, a catchy label for the phenomenon of cars growing bigger and heavier, has left vehicles on average 10 inches longer than they were three decades ago. This has created larger blind spots in some cars, making the roads more lethal, especially for pedestrians and cyclists.
Which indicator was the most revealing?
To me, the most revealing indicators are the ones that elicit a lot of responses from our readers, the way our recent look at the cost of child care did. Readers told us that the expense of care had dramatically affected their lives by, among other things, forcing them to contend with where to live (near relatives who can help?), whether to pursue careers (should one parent quit working to care for a child?) or whether to have children at all. Here’s some of what we heard:
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“The cost of child care is probably the biggest single factor that has led us to only have one child rather than two,” one reader wrote. “If the U.S. wants to increase birthrates, it needs to address the outrageous cost of child care for regular families in high-cost states.”
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“The worst part is how this affects our ability to have more children,” another said. “We simply can’t afford to, and time is running out for me to do so. It’s tragic that our finances and biology don’t line up under this broken system.”
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Another noted that the issue seems to be uniquely American: “We have a problem. And it’s not the cost of child care, or our ‘failing schools.’ Having traveled internationally a fair bit, I maintain America is the least child friendly culture I’ve ever been in.”
Is there an issue that you think is particularly hard to measure?
As we’ve rolled out this newsletter, we’ve also been developing a wide-ranging series on violence prevention. We spoke with dozens of people across the nation and elsewhere — youth mentors, public health experts, community organizers, cops — who work to make their communities safer.
While editing this project, I’ve been struck by how much easier it is to measure violence than it is to measure the absence of violence (something we hope to explore in future editions of the newsletter). Rates of homicide, robbery and other crimes help us understand how dangerous a community is, but how do we quantify how peaceful a place can be? Our sources in Camden, N.J., a city once ranked among the nation’s most dangerous, often responded to this question not with numbers, but with sensory anecdotes:
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“You just didn’t hear all the ambulances,” one resident told us.
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Another said the return of jump rope was revealing. Now that the city was safer, he said, “I see the moms out there jumping double Dutch with their children.”
Catch up on past editions of the newsletter:
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On commute times, and the hybrid workers clogging the roads
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On housing starts, and the “YIMBY” movement
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On college applications, and the scourge of course “shutouts”
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On the birthrate, and why its drop might be a sign of progress
Explore the full archive here.
— Anna Venarchik
Your turn
Test your knowledge: Google has recently updated Gmail to allow users to change the email addresses they originally signed up with. What year was Gmail introduced?
Tell us your thoughts: Reader, we’d love to know your responses to the same questions Anna answered above. What have you learned from the indicators we’ve explored over the last few months? What have you found to be really surprising or revealing? What do you find important, but hard to measure? And are there any issues that affect your life that you would like us to explore through an indicator? Let us know at [email protected].
Anna Venarchik contributed reporting.
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
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