Fatal dog attacks in the US

It appears that as Germans have collectively decided to drink less beer over the past fifteen years, Americans have simultaneously become safer from their own dogs, which suggests either that Teutonic sobriety exerts a gravitational pull on canine temperament across the Atlantic, or that the universe is simply reminding us that it finds our search for meaning deeply entertaining. The correlation is extraordinarily tight: 93 percent, moving in perfect inverse lockstep, as if someone up there is operating both dials with a single hand.

What's actually happening here, I suspect, is that both variables are being tugged along by larger economic and demographic currents that nobody's particularly paying attention to. German beer consumption declined during the 2008 financial crisis and never quite recovered as younger Germans shifted toward wine and spirits, while dog attack fatalities in America fell partly because veterinary care improved, partly because awareness campaigns actually worked, and partly because the composition of dog ownership changed—fewer pit bulls in fighting rings, more suburban golden retrievers. It's rather like watching two unrelated passengers on the same sinking ship both happen to move toward the same lifeboat; they're not causing each other's movement, they're both responding to the same tilt of the deck.

The lesson, if there is one, is that we are pattern-detection machines operating in a universe that contains far more statistical noise than signal, and sometimes two wholly separate human behaviors in different countries will dance together for fifteen years for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other. Which is either comforting or deeply unsettling, depending on how much you've had to drink. The dogs don't know about German breweries.