Choking deaths on food in the US

The universe, it seems, has decided that for every new billionaire China mints, an American must choke on their dinner, as if some cosmic ledger demands balance between wealth accumulation and airway obstruction. Between 2010 and 2021, these two phenomena moved together with the kind of synchronisation you'd expect from a deliberate system, not two supposedly independent datasets about money and food. One wonders what the Chinese billionaires are eating that's so entertaining from twelve thousand miles away.

The likeliest culprit is simply that both numbers ride the same economic wave: as China's economy boomed and produced more ultra-wealthy individuals, America's population grew by roughly 30 million people, and more people means more people eating, and more people eating means more people choking, which is a grimly predictable arithmetic. You could also argue that the standardisation of fast food and processed snacks across this period—things engineered to slip down your throat with alarming efficiency or not at all—affected both datasets equally, though one of them affected Chinese balance sheets and the other affected American emergency rooms. The correlation coefficient here is 0.935, which is to say these two lines followed each other so faithfully that if you'd squinted at the graph from across the room, you might have thought you were looking at one variable measured twice.

This is what pattern-seeking creatures do when given time series data and a functioning internet connection: we find that billionaires and choking deaths waltz together, and somehow this feels meaningful. It probably isn't. What it absolutely is, however, is a reminder that correlation's job is not to make sense but merely to exist, indifferent to whether we understand it. The numbers don't care what we think they mean.