Average US movie ticket price

It is a curious property of the universe that Indian software engineers and American moviegoers should move through the years in such perfect synchronisation, as though choreographed by some particularly meticulous accountant in the cloud. One might have expected these two populations to be as related as popcorn prices and the mating habits of Icelandic beetles. Yet here they are, linked by a correlation so tight it makes you wonder if someone forgot to shuffle the data properly, or if we are simply very, very good at finding patterns in the tea leaves of spreadsheets.

What we are probably watching is the steady march of globalisation and the digital economy meeting inflation, both of which have been humming along quite reliably since 2015. As India's tech sector boomed—those exports grew from around 70 billion dollars to well over 200 billion in this period—the entire ecosystem of consumer spending in developed economies grew with it, and cinema tickets got swept up in that tide like everything else. Both economies were riding the same long wave of connectivity and rising purchasing power, which is to say that a movie ticket in 2023 cost nearly double what it did in 2015, climbing from about 8.97 dollars to over 10 dollars, and that synchronisation reflects the fact that we all live in the same economic weather system now.

The real story here is that almost nothing happens in isolation anymore, which is either comforting or terrifying depending on your mood. When you zoom out far enough, you realise that correlation is not lying to us—it is just pointing at a much larger truth we have already chosen not to see. Two things moving together usually means they are both responding to the same invisible hand.