Civil engineering doctorates awarded

It turns out that the more Americans we train to build bridges, tunnels, and shopping malls, the more of us choke to death on food, which is either a damning indictment of our civil infrastructure's ability to support human swallowing, or simply proof that the universe enjoys a joke with a 91% correlation coefficient and absolutely no punchline. The cosmic irony is that these doctorates are awarded by institutions presumably staffed by people who have mastered the art of not dying while eating in the cafeteria.

What's actually happening here is probably less sinister and more tediously obvious: both lines are simply tracking population growth and demographic shifts across seventeen years. As America added roughly twenty million people between 2005 and 2021, we also added more civil engineering programs (universities expand, more people go to grad school, the whole ecosystem inflates like a balloon animal), and naturally, more people means more opportunities to choke on a hot dog at a baseball game. Consider that choking deaths in absolute terms still represent roughly one person per 100,000—a rounding error in human mortality—while doctoral degrees have climbed from about 2,000 annually to over 2,500, both driven by the same underlying tide of economic activity and human reproduction.

This is what happens when you measure two unrelated phenomena in a growing system: they tend to move together simply because everything is growing, and our pattern-recognition hardware, evolved to spot tigers in grass, cannot help but spot tigers in spreadsheets. Neither the civil engineers nor the food are to blame. We just really, genuinely want to find the story.