Bicyclist traffic fatalities

It turns out that as China's billionaire class has grown from 130 to 626 people between 2010 and 2022, American cyclists have died in proportional lockstep, suggesting either that economic concentration creates a psychic pressure that makes people wobble into traffic, or that we have simply become very good at noticing when two unrelated lines point the same direction. The universe, one suspects, is not trying to tell us anything at all.

But here is the thing: both statistics are probably just riding the same historical current. China's billionaire boom reflects explosive GDP growth, urbanization, and a population still climbing toward 1.4 billion—more people, more wealth, more everything. Meanwhile, American cycling deaths track something simpler: more people cycling, particularly as the 2010s saw an explosion in urban commuting and recreational cycling culture, while infrastructure didn't keep pace. It is the same story told twice in different currencies. A billionaire is created somewhere in Shenzhen every few days; in the same week, perhaps, a few more people decide a bicycle is how they'll get to work, and the roads are not ready for either.

What we are watching is two separate surges riding a wave of global growth and behavioral change, correlated only in the sense that they both happened to accelerate during the same decade when the world tilted sharply toward different choices. The real scandal is not that these numbers move together, but that we notice they do. We have confused simultaneity with meaning again.