Ladder-related ER visits in the US

It appears that Americans have spent the better part of a decade climbing ladders with inverse proportion to the number of Thai tourists arriving at Suvarnabhumi Airport, which is either a remarkable cosmic coincidence or evidence that the universe operates on a principle of compensatory misadventure we have yet to name. Perhaps as fewer people fell off ladders, more people decided Southeast Asia was worth the trip. One suspects the ladder gods and the tourism gods have been playing an elaborate game of chess across the Pacific.

Both changed sharply in 2020 for opposite reasons that trace to the same cause. Thailand's tourist arrivals collapsed under border closures, while ladder injuries surged in the US as locked-down homeowners took on DIY projects they'd otherwise have hired out. One line is about people who couldn't travel; the other is about people who stayed home and climbed things.

So we have discovered that ladder injuries and Thai tourism are not, in fact, secretly connected by some hidden mechanism of human behavior, but rather both are passengers on the same economic elevator. This is actually far more interesting than if they were causally linked, because it reminds us that the world is full of innocent bystanders to the same larger forces. The correlation is real. The meaning is optional.