Fatal dog attacks in the US

It is a curious fact, and one which the universe has seen fit to arrange with what can only be described as a wry sense of timing, that as Americans have grown progressively more likely to die from dog attacks, they have simultaneously and with equal enthusiasm begun purchasing used clothing and furniture at rates that would make a magpie weep with envy. One might have expected these two phenomena to be entirely unrelated, which they are, and yet here they move together like dancers who have never met but learned the same routine by accident. The statistical correlation is 0.913, which is to say nearly perfect, which is to say utterly meaningless, which is to say precisely why we find it so unsettling.

The actual explanation is almost certainly that both trends are riding the coattails of something far more prosaic: America's growing population, which has been steadily expanding for the past dozen years like a houseguest who's overstayed their welcome and is now eating your leftovers. A larger population means more people to adopt rescue dogs with unclear temperaments, and more people with disposable income to browse the racks at Goodwill on a Saturday afternoon. Add in the rise of online secondhand marketplaces—Poshmark, Depop, ThriftUp—and suddenly we're talking about a thrift market that's grown from roughly $17 billion in 2012 to something closer to $40 billion by 2023, while dog attack fatalities have edged upward from a handful to a handful-plus-a-few. Both trends also track with economic anxiety and social media's particular genius for making people feel simultaneously impoverished and optimistic.

And so we are left with the peculiar modern predicament of having data so precise and abundant that we can draw nearly perfect lines between things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other, which is either the greatest discovery of the information age or its most elegant con. The universe, it seems, is happy to let us find whatever patterns we're looking for, as long as we're not paying attention to what's actually going on. Two unrelated markets, one cosmic joke.