Deaths from falling out of bed in the US

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us if we thought about it for more than thirty seconds, that the number of Americans tumbling fatally out of their beds has moved in almost perfect synchronisation with the total market value of a company that sells books through the internet. One might expect these two phenomena to have roughly the same relationship as a penguin has to a mortgage broker, and yet here they are, correlating at 0.912, which is to say, practically holding hands. The universe, it turns out, does enjoy a joke, though the joke is mostly on us.

The real culprit here is almost certainly population growth, that vast and patient tide that lifts all boats, even the boats of people falling out of them. Between 2005 and 2021, the US population grew from 295 million to 331 million—about twelve million new people, many of them older people, and older people, I should mention, fall out of beds with the regularity of rain in Seattle. Meanwhile Amazon grew not because beds got more dangerous but because the economy expanded, wealth concentrated in certain sectors, and millions of people discovered that they could have someone else deliver their socks. Both trends rode the same economic wave, the same demographic bulge, the same long escalator of American consumption and human fragility.

What we have stumbled upon, then, is not causation but a kind of statistical conspiracy—two separate human stories happening to move together like passengers on the same train, utterly unaware of each other's existence. This should teach us something about correlation, pattern recognition, and our species' deep need to believe that everything means something. It probably doesn't, but we'll keep looking anyway.