Pedestrian traffic fatalities

It turns out that as India's IT services exports have climbed from $62 billion to $178 billion, pedestrian traffic fatalities in the United States have climbed right alongside them, suggesting either that American pedestrians have developed an obscure anxiety disorder triggered by Indian software revenues, or that the universe simply enjoys a good joke about which statistics happen to move together. The correlation is genuinely unsettling: 0.928, which is the kind of number that makes you wonder if you've discovered something profound or merely convinced yourself that coincidence is a form of evidence.

What's probably happening here—and I say this with the warmth of someone who was also briefly fooled—is that both numbers are essentially riding the same wave of global economic expansion and population growth between 2015 and 2022. India's IT boom was powered by worldwide digital infrastructure demand, which was itself fueled by rising GDP, more people, more cars, more movement generally; meanwhile, American pedestrian fatalities were climbing partly because there were simply more people walking in more places at more times, even as vehicle speeds and distracted driving increased. Consider that in 2015, there were roughly 130 million vehicle registrations in the US; by 2022, that number had grown to 145 million. Both trends are essentially saying: the world got busier, richer, and more numerically productive.

The real lesson here is that we are pattern-detection animals living in a world bursting with trends, and almost any two things measured over the same period will probably correlate with something else measured during the same period. India's IT exports and American pedestrian deaths move together for no reason that would survive a moment's logical scrutiny, yet here we are, surprised and mildly delighted by their mathematical friendship. The universe contains infinite correlations. Most of them mean nothing.