Unruly airline passenger incidents

It is a curious fact, and one that would seem to defy any rational explanation, that as New Yorkers grew increasingly inclined to physically assault flight attendants between 2017 and 2022, they simultaneously lost all interest in watching people sing and dance on Broadway stages. One might reasonably expect these to be entirely unrelated pursuits, rather like correlating hat sales with seismic activity, yet here we find them locked together in a statistical embrace that would make a pattern-seeking algorithm weep. The universe, it turns out, has a sense of timing.

What's actually happening here is that both metrics got caught in the undertow of the same economic and social currents—specifically, the pandemic's approach and arrival obliterated Broadway attendance starting in 2020, while pandemic-era air travel surged with a particular kind of frustrated traveler, one who had been cooped up for months and was deeply annoyed about mask mandates at 35,000 feet. Consider that in 2019, Broadway grossed over $1.8 billion annually with nearly 15 million attendees; by 2021, theaters were dark and passengers were somewhere between desperate and furious. The confounding variable here isn't really psychology so much as it is a shared external shock—economic disruption, lockdowns, and the particular madness of aviation during a crisis—that squeezed both phenomena in opposite directions simultaneously.

What we've stumbled upon is less a mystery of causation and more a reminder that when you have enough data points and enough imagination, you will eventually find two unrelated human activities that move in perfect synchronization, usually because they've both been clobbered by the same invisible force. The airline incidents and Broadway attendance didn't cause each other; they were both responding to something larger and stranger than either of them. Sometimes correlation is just two people drowning in the same river.