US lottery ticket sales

Between 2012 and 2023, LGBTQ+ self-identification and US lottery ticket sales both grew, correlating at 0.9622 across twelve data points. What the data actually shows is that the 2010s were a decade in which many things went up simultaneously: social openness, lottery jackpots, and the number of datasets available to prove that everything correlates with everything when given enough time. The identity survey and the lottery ticket share a direction and a decade, not a mechanism.

LGBTQ+ identification grew from 3.5% to over 7%. Lottery sales grew from $73 billion to over $100 billion. Both are twelve-year upward trends driven by entirely independent forces—generational social change and state-marketed gambling expansion.

Twelve years of two things going up will produce a strong correlation. The identity metric and the gambling revenue share a direction and a decade, not a cause.