Small things that explain how money really works

Hi, I'm Tony Vu. I live in Vietnam, where a lot of the economy happens on the pavement: the corner shop with sachets hanging in the doorway, the motorbike that carries a family and a fridge, the street stall that somehow sells lunch for a dollar.

To most viewers in the US or the UK these things look like quirks. They are not. Each one is a sensible answer to a real constraint, such as being paid by the day, having little space at home, or living next to a shop instead of a drive away from one. Small Change Atlas takes one of those small things per episode and follows it back to the system behind it.

How an episode is made

1. One question. Every episode starts from a single question a curious outsider would ask, like why would anyone sell shampoo one wash at a time?
2. A fact sheet before a script. Every number that will be spoken goes into a fact sheet with its source first. If a number can't be sourced, it stays out of the episode.
3. Script, voice and edit. The narration uses a synthetic text-to-speech voice. The visuals are a hand-built paper-collage style, so every episode looks like a page from the same notebook.
4. Published with its sources. Each episode page on this site has the chapters, the full transcript and the complete fact sheet, with links.

Corrections

If you find a number that is wrong or out of date, write to hello@smallchangeatlas.com. I fix the episode page, note the correction there, and pin it under the video.

Follow along

New episodes come out every other Friday on YouTube. The articles go deeper into the numbers behind each one.