Babies named Khaleesi

From 2011 to 2018, babies named Khaleesi rose with the fortunes of Game of Thrones from near-zero to a peak of 560 in 2015, while shopping cart injuries in the US declined — producing an r of -0.9673 and a question that has never been asked before in the history of statistics. One interpretation: parents naming their children after the Mother of Dragons were so preoccupied with HBO that they stopped going to supermarkets, reducing trolley-related carnage. Another: the rise of the Khaleesi generation coincides with the rise of grocery delivery, which made shopping carts increasingly optional for the delivery-ordering class. Both explanations are wrong, which is what makes them attractive.

This negative correlation is a genuine coincidence produced by two trends moving in opposite directions for independent reasons across a short window. Game of Thrones premiered in 2011 and drove Khaleesi naming to a peak around 2015-2016 before the show's declining cultural reception reduced the name's appeal, with names dropping sharply after the controversial final season in 2019. Shopping cart injuries, tracked by the CPSC at around 24,000 annually in the early 2010s, may have declined due to improved cart design, store layout changes, and increased parking lot safety standards. The two series share no population, no mechanism, and no plausible link.

Short-window correlations involving cultural phenomena are particularly treacherous because the cultural event has a natural rise-and-fall arc that will mirror any declining trend over the same period. Khaleesi names went up and then down; the falling trend of shopping cart injuries simply happened to overlap with the upward phase of Westeros's influence on American naming conventions.