Pay phones remaining in the USChina resident patent applications
Between 2010 and 2021, every patent filed in China sent another American pay phone quietly into retirement, according to a correlation coefficient that has no business being -0.97. The pay phone, that stalwart monument to public connectivity, dwindled from tens of thousands to a few hundred scattered survivors — each one presumably staring eastward, wondering if things might have gone differently. China's patent filings, meanwhile, grew to become the largest in the world, suggesting a civilization in a tremendous hurry to invent replacements for things the pay phone never got to be.
China's resident patent applications grew from roughly 390,000 in 2010 to over 1.5 million by 2021, reflecting the government's sustained industrial policy investment in R&D and innovation metrics. US pay phones declined from an estimated 500,000 in the early 2000s to fewer than 100,000 by the late 2010s, driven entirely by smartphone adoption making them economically unviable. Both trends reflect the global technology adoption curve of the 2010s: China's manufacturing and innovation economy was scaling up precisely as legacy analog infrastructure in the West was being decommissioned. These are parallel expressions of the same decade of technological transition, not causally linked phenomena.
The rise of one civilization's innovation economy and the death of another country's analog relics share a timeline but not a mechanism. History has a habit of moving everything at once.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Pay phones remaining in the US” vs “China resident patent applications” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
