Why South Koreans grew taller so quickly

As a world population, we’re growing taller, but South Koreans seemed to grow a lot quicker over the past century. Vox breaks down height distributions and explains the increased rate in South Korea in their Vox-y combination of paper, slides, and digital. Wealth and improved food supply appears to have helped things along.

There’s one part when the narrator Alvin Chang says he has to adjust the vertical axis to see the change in height better. My chest might have tightened as my mind went to bar-charts-start-at-zero land, but the bar chart in the video switches from height to change in height, so it was all okay. Phew.

Chart Type Used

Bar Chart