Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities

It is a curious fact, and one that says something rather unflattering about the human brain's commitment to pattern recognition, that the number of people dying in cars while intoxicated has moved almost perfectly in step with the number of Chinese billionaires over the past thirteen years, as though both were being conducted by the same invisible orchestra tuning its instruments to economic growth and human mortality. One might expect these to be entirely unrelated, like comparing the price of tea in China to the number of left-handed plumbers in Des Moines, which of course is also probably correlated at ninety-one percent. The universe, it seems, is far more interested in pranks than in making sense.

The real culprit here is almost certainly that both metrics are riding waves generated by larger economic forces—as China's GDP expanded dramatically from 2010 to 2022, so did vehicle ownership and consumption patterns, while the United States (where most of these driving deaths occur) experienced its own economic fluctuations tied to the same global cycles. Billionaire creation and drunk driving deaths are both behaving like passengers in the same economic car, and it happens that car is accelerating. To give this some weight: China added roughly one billionaire per week during the peak years of this correlation, which is itself a statistic that makes your eyes water when you pause to imagine it. Meanwhile, American alcohol-impaired driving fatalities lingered stubbornly around 10,000 annually, a number that hasn't budged despite being printed on dashboards, billboards, and public health posters for decades.

What we're really observing is that prosperity and recklessness, growth and danger, appear to be distant cousins in the same family tree of modernity, moving together because they're both products of the same historical moment rather than because one is causing the other. The correlation is real. The causation is something else entirely, probably several something elses, none of them as dramatic as the numbers suggest. We just noticed them dancing together and forgot to ask why.