Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It turns out that as China's billionaires have multiplied like a particularly successful bacteria in a petri dish of venture capital, so too have the people getting hit by cars, which suggests either that wealth creation is somehow fatal to pedestrians or that we are, as a species, extraordinarily good at finding patterns in the wreckage of progress. One might almost think the billionaires were doing it on purpose.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly that both statistics are riding the same wave of Chinese urbanization and motorization—between 2010 and 2022, the number of vehicles in China roughly tripled, from about 78 million to nearly 320 million, which is rather like suddenly giving everyone in North America and Europe a car on the same afternoon. Simultaneously, economic growth created the conditions for billionaire accumulation, while those same roads became increasingly chaotic places where pedestrians and increasingly distracted drivers were sharing space for the first time in human history. It is, in other words, simply that more cars kill more people, and more cars are what billionaires are made from.

The correlation between pedestrian deaths and billionaire count tells us something true about data: that it will sing in harmony with almost anything if you play two songs at once and don't listen too carefully to what they're actually about. We are all, it seems, Chinese traffic engineers searching for meaning in a spreadsheet. The real story was always just: growth.