A K-pop video with the choreography of a man pretending to ride a horse, and the world's largest patent office, both posting bigger numbers every year. Somewhere a Shenzhen engineer files a wireless charging patent and somewhere on the same desk the playcount ticks over by another billion.
China's resident patent applications grew from about 400,000 in 2012 to over 1.4 million by 2021, the country becoming by some distance the world's largest patent office through a mix of genuine R&D growth and aggressive subsidy schemes that incentivised filings. Gangnam Style's view counter passed 1 billion in 2012 and kept compounding as YouTube's mobile audience ballooned, with the video crossing 5 billion views by 2021. Both lines reflect the same thing: a global online infrastructure scaling up to absorb an enormous amount of data, whether the data is patent claims or horse-dance memes. The internet got large.
The 2010s were a counting decade. Whoever was counting found bigger numbers than they expected.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Gangnam Style YouTube views” vs “China resident patent applications” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
