US traffic fatalities

It turns out that as China's billionaires have multiplied—a phenomenon one might reasonably expect to correlate with, say, smartphone ownership or luxury yacht sales—they have instead chosen to move in perfect synchrony with the number of Americans dying in car crashes, a connection so thoroughly unrelated to anything resembling causation that it makes you wonder whether the universe is not so much expanding as it is winking at us. The correlation is 0.966, which is to say nearly perfect, which is to say almost certainly meaningless. We have built a machine for seeing patterns in clouds, and the clouds have begun to cooperate.

What's likely happening here is that both metrics are simply riding the same economic wave: as the global economy grew from 2010 to 2022, China's wealth concentrated into billionaire fortunes (the number climbed from around 140 to nearly 300), while simultaneously, Americans drove more cars, drove them faster, and did so increasingly while distracted—all natural byproducts of rising GDP and disposable income in a country where a vehicle is not a luxury but an assumed appendage. The US population also grew during this period, and the total miles driven increased from 2.9 trillion to over 3.2 trillion annually, creating more opportunities for the statistical gods to align two entirely unrelated graphs. It's rather like noticing that coffee consumption rises with literacy rates and feeling compelled to explain why books make you caffeinated.

The real lesson is not that Chinese billionaires are somehow responsible for American traffic deaths, but rather that when two datasets both trend upward over the same thirteen years, they will hold hands whether they know each other or not. This is what humans do: we find the pattern and then spend weeks trying to explain why the pattern is there, seldom pausing to ask whether the pattern is simply what happens when you multiply unrelated things by time. The universe does not conspire. We just look for conspiracies everywhere.