US traffic fatalities

It turns out that the more money we collectively decide to throw at photogenic people standing in front of products, the more of us die in cars, which is either a perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism or proof that the universe enjoys a joke at our expense. Between 2016 and 2022, these two graphs climbed in such perfect tandem that you'd think influencer posts were actively steering traffic at highway speeds. The correlation is 0.891, which is disturbingly high for two things that should have absolutely nothing to do with each other. We've accidentally discovered that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine while also trying to sell us protein powder.

The real culprit is almost certainly economic growth and its weird side effects. As the economy expanded during most of this period, both more money sloshed around looking for places to land (hello, influencer marketing budgets that grew from roughly $1.7 billion in 2016 to $4.6 billion by 2022) and more people could afford cars, drove them more often, and took riskier roads at riskier times. It's like watching two students whose test scores both improve because the school got better funding—they're moving together not because one causes the other, but because a third thing entirely (available capital, disposable income, economic optimism) is pushing them both along. Meanwhile, population growth, the proliferation of ride-sharing, and the genuine explosion of smartphone-based distraction (the very infrastructure that enables influencer marketing) all conspired to increase both the money flowing to Instagram and the number of people nodding off at the wheel.

And so we're left staring at two datasets that march in lockstep for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other, which is precisely what makes correlation so treacherous. The human mind sees the line go up twice and immediately wants to write a story connecting them, when really we've just stumbled onto two separate consequences of the same cultural and economic moment. Perhaps that's the real pattern: we're all influencers now, selling each other on things that don't matter. Even statistics.