IRS individual tax returns e-filed

It turns out that the number of Americans filing their taxes with the IRS moves in almost perfect lockstep with the number of people subscribing to a man who films himself giving away money on the internet. This is the sort of correlation that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing a joke on statisticians, or whether statisticians are playing a joke on the universe, or whether both parties simply deserve what they're getting. One moves because the government requires it; the other moves because humans apparently cannot help watching someone be generous at scale.

The obvious culprit here is growth—sheer, undifferentiated human population growth and digital adoption swelling both datasets like rising bread dough. Between 2016 and 2022, more Americans came of age, more Americans earned taxable income, and more Americans discovered YouTube, which was simultaneously becoming less of a novelty and more of an involuntary national utility. Consider that e-filing increased from about 150 million returns to 180 million over this period—a growth rate that roughly mirrors internet penetration and smartphone ubiquity. MrBeast's subscriber count climbed from roughly 3 million to 200 million in that same window, powered by the same tailwinds: algorithmic recommendation, pandemic-era screen time, and the peculiar human addiction to watching competence enacted at high speed. Both trends are less about causation and more about riding the same escalator upward.

This is what pattern-seeking does to us: it finds the signal in the noise and then shows us a signal in the static. Both the IRS and MrBeast are measuring growth, and growth during this period was the dominant theme in American life, which means they were always going to move together. The correlation tells you almost nothing about why, and everything about how readily we mistake synchronicity for significance. We are, it seems, pattern-recognition machines that occasionally mistake their own reflection for a law of physics.