US homeschool students

It turns out that the number of American parents deciding to teach their children at home moves in almost perfect synchronisation with the number of Chinese consumers clicking 'buy now' on discounted electronics during a single twenty-four-hour shopping event, which is either the most elegant proof of universal interconnectedness or a reminder that correlation will happily eat your brain if you let it. The universe appears to have decided that these two things—homeschooling and bargain hunting—are secretly the same phenomenon, which they are definitely not.

Both trends are almost certainly riding the same economic wave, which makes perfect sense once you stop laughing. Homeschooling in the US grew steadily through this period as broadband internet made it viable, while Alibaba's Singles Day (launched 2009) explosively scaled up as Chinese middle-class incomes rose and e-commerce infrastructure matured. You're looking at two different manifestations of the same underlying shift: more people with disposable income, access to digital tools, and confidence that they could handle things themselves rather than relying on traditional institutions. Between 2009 and 2021, Chinese e-commerce users roughly doubled from 300 million to over 700 million—imagine fitting the entire population of the United States twice into a shopping platform, and you begin to see why Alibaba's numbers got quite large.

We are all, it seems, marching to the drumbeat of broadband penetration and rising prosperity, though we've convinced ourselves we're making independent choices about children's education and holiday shopping. The two datasets move together not because homeschooling parents are secretly influenced by Chinese consumer behaviour, but because both emerge from the same historical moment: one where the internet made previously impossible things suddenly feasible. It's oddly comforting, in a way. Or possibly terrifying.