Per capita yogurt consumption in the US

It is a curious feature of the human mind that it will happily accept the proposition that Americans have been consuming yogurt at steadily increasing rates while, quite independently and with no causal relationship whatsoever, more of them have been crushed to death by their own furniture. One might imagine these two phenomena would have nothing to do with each other, and one would be correct, and yet here we are with an 86 percent correlation spanning twenty-one years, which is to say that the universe appears to have a sense of humor after all, albeit a rather dark one involving dairy products and gravity.

The real culprit, almost certainly, is simply that America has been getting richer and fatter over these two decades, which sounds like a tautology but genuinely explains both trends. As household incomes rose, families bought more furniture (bigger TVs, heavier entertainment centers, that inexplicable second sectional), while simultaneously yogurt transitioned from a niche health food to a $9 billion industry, which is to say it became normal. Add in population growth—the US added roughly 50 million people between 2002 and 2022—and you have more yogurt consumers and more households with wobbly electronics, all expanding in concert like a coordinated, entirely unrelated dance. The tragic irony is that the very prosperity making yogurt affordable is what fills homes with unstable towers of entertainment technology.

And so we return to the original observation: yogurt consumption and furniture fatalities move together because they are both symptoms of the same underlying story, which is simply that America got more prosperous, more consumer-oriented, and unfortunately more likely to stack heavy objects in precarious ways. The correlation is real. The causation is invisible. This is perhaps the most important lesson Spurious has to teach us, and it is also somehow the most depressing.