Deaths from falling out of bed in the USChina resident patent applications
China filed its way to becoming the world's leading patent applicant while, in a parallel development that no one ordered, Americans were falling out of bed and dying at a steadily increasing rate, the two trends correlating at 0.9668 between 2010 and 2021. It seems churlish to suggest that Chinese innovation is somehow responsible for American nocturnal instability, and yet the data makes a compelling if insane case. Perhaps the patents are for mattresses with higher edges. Perhaps someone in Shenzhen is aware of this graph and is choosing not to comment. The victims, unfortunately, were not available for follow-up.
China's patent applications grew explosively over this period—from roughly 391,000 resident applications in 2010 to over 1.5 million by 2021—as the government aggressively incentivized intellectual property filings as a marker of innovation. Deaths from falling out of bed in the US are, grimly, a real and growing category driven almost entirely by demographic aging: the over-75 population is most vulnerable, and that cohort expanded substantially through the 2010s. Both series grow because of independent long-run trends—Chinese state-directed innovation policy and American demographic aging—that happen to share a time horizon.
Two nations, two completely unrelated trajectories, one absurd number. The data is not wrong; it is merely indifferent to meaning.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Deaths from falling out of bed in the US” vs “China resident patent applications” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
