Fatal dog attacks in the US

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find deeply reassuring, that the number of Americans killed by dogs and the number of places where Americans can charge electric vehicles should move together through the 2010s like a pair of synchronized swimmers who have never met. One might reasonably expect these two metrics to behave as though they had been selected at random from the phone book, yet here they are, correlation coefficient of 0.891, moving in such lockstep that you begin to suspect the universe is playing a practical joke on the very concept of causality.

The culprit, almost certainly, is economic growth and urbanization—both dogs and charging infrastructure cluster wherever Americans are moving, building, and spending money, which turns out to be largely the same places. Between 2010 and 2022, the US population grew by roughly 25 million people, and those people didn't distribute evenly; they concentrated in suburban and exurban regions where you might own both a dog (or several) and drive a car expensive enough to need Level 2 charging at home. The actual fatal dog attacks in America hover around 30 per year, meaning you're statistically safer from dogs than from lightning, ladders, or the general misjudgments of daily life—yet both the tragedies and the charging stations faithfully trace the same underlying curve of American settlement patterns and disposable income.

What we are witnessing, then, is not a prediction that electric vehicles will somehow cause dogs to become homicidal, nor that vicious dogs are secretly demanding better charging infrastructure. Rather, it is a reminder that when you measure enough things in a growing, unequally distributed population, some will dance together by pure accident, and the human brain—that magnificent pattern-recognition engine—will absolutely insist on finding meaning in the waltz. We saw what we wanted to see.