Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It turns out that the more money we collectively decide to pay attractive people to post photos of themselves, the more pedestrians we hit with cars, a correlation so tight (0.974) that one might reasonably suspect the influencers themselves are out there with tiny vehicles, methodically working through their targets. This is either a profound comment on modern civilization or a reminder that when you graph enough numbers against each other, the universe becomes a kind of cosmic joke shop where the punchlines arrive on stretchers.

Both metrics are, quite plausibly, passengers on the same economic growth train between 2016 and 2022. As GDP expanded, more people had money to spend on sponsored content while simultaneously more people owned cars, drove more often, and populated busier streets—an entirely reasonable explosion of concurrent human activity that has absolutely nothing to do with influencers causing traffic deaths, though the data won't stop you from imagining it. The influencer marketing industry grew from roughly $1.7 billion to $16.4 billion in this period, which is rather like watching a industry inflate from a shoe box to a small house while vehicle miles traveled climbed in neat synchronisation, both of them hitching rides on the back of post-pandemic economic reopening and increased consumer spending.

We are pattern-seeking creatures who have built machines to find patterns, and sometimes those machines find patterns the way a metal detector finds bottle caps—technically accurate, structurally meaningless, but deeply satisfying to discover. The real culprit here is almost certainly economic expansion and its various ripple effects, not sponsored content, though the data makes them dance together perfectly. We saw what we wanted to see.