Restaurant spending per capita

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find out far too late in life, that the amount of money Americans spend on restaurants correlates almost perfectly with the number of them falling fatally out of bed, suggesting that either prosperity makes us drowsy, or beds have become subtly more vengeful over the past seventeen years. The universe, it seems, has decided that fine dining and fatal bedside accidents are merely two expressions of the same underlying cosmic principle, which is to say that the universe has a sense of humour and it is at our expense.

What we're almost certainly watching here is the steady expansion of the American economy and population from 2005 to 2021, both of which pull upward on restaurant spending in the obvious way, but also on mortality statistics in ways that are considerably less obvious. As more people exist, more people eat out (restaurants multiply, per-capita spending climbs), and more people — particularly older people, who dominate falling-out-of-bed fatalities — are simply around to make mistakes in bedrooms. Consider that in 2005, Americans spent roughly $2,600 per capita on restaurants annually; by 2021, that had climbed to somewhere north of $3,500, an increase of about 35 percent, which is also approximately how many more people were alive to fall out of them.

We have spent the better part of a century training ourselves to see patterns in noise, and then congratulating ourselves for our cleverness when we find them, particularly when those patterns are sufficiently strange that they seem to reveal something deep about existence. What restaurant spending and bedroom fatalities are actually revealing is merely that we live in an aging, expanding, increasingly prosperous country where multiple things rise together. The correlation is real. The causation is imaginary.