Adults who own a Blackberry

It is a curious fact, and one which the universe seems to have tucked away in a filing cabinet marked 'Do Not Open', that the number of adults carrying a Blackberry in their pocket moved in almost perfect inverse proportion to the number of holes being dug in the ground to build new houses. One might reasonably expect these two things to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, which is rather the point. Yet here we are, tracking them like stars, watching one rise as the other falls, for twenty-one consecutive years, with the kind of mathematical certainty that makes you suspect the universe is having a laugh at our expense.

What's actually happening here, I suspect, is that both metrics are being dragged along by the same invisible puppeteer: the economic cycle, that great lurching beast that nobody fully understands but everyone pretends to. Between 2008 and 2012, housing construction cratered (down to about 600,000 starts annually in the US), and simultaneously, everyone who'd been sensibly rejecting Blackberry for an iPhone suddenly had the numbers to prove it. But there's something deeper — the same recession and recovery that froze construction sites also accelerated the smartphone revolution, making those clunky thumb-keyboards look about as futuristic as a fax machine. Add in population shifts, the slow decline of business culture itself, and the fact that people stopped wanting to carry bricks in their hands just as they stopped wanting to build houses with actual bricks, and you start to see how two utterly unrelated things can tango.

The correlation is real, the causation is fiction, and somewhere in that gap lives most of human reasoning. We are pattern-matching creatures trapped in a world that contains approximately seventeen million meaningless correlations, and we have somehow convinced ourselves that noticing one is the same as understanding something. The Blackberry and the housing start are merely two ships passing in opposite directions in the night, each completely unaware of the other's existence. We just noticed they crossed paths.