US cosmetic procedures performed

It turns out that somewhere in the vast machinery of American consumer behaviour, the number of people willing to have their faces reconstructed moves in almost perfect synchronisation with how many points a single basketball player scores per game, which is either proof that the universe is fundamentally comedic or proof that we are all simply very good at noticing patterns in noise. The correlation coefficient sits at 0.913, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians uncomfortable and baffled conspiracy theorists feel vindicated. One suspects LeBron has no idea he is a leading indicator of rhinoplasty.

The real culprit here is almost certainly prosperity and its many downstream effects. Between 2015 and 2023, the US economy generally improved (with a brief pandemic interlude), meaning more people had disposable income for cosmetic procedures while LeBron, now in his thirties, was entering a career phase where his efficiency and volume both climbed as he learned to preserve his body through strategic rest and increasingly obsessive training regimens. Both trends also benefited from the same cultural machinery: social media made aesthetic perfectionism more visible and desirable, while simultaneously making athletic performance—the metrics, the highlights, the per-game averages—more omnipresent and measurable. Consider that 2.3 million cosmetic procedures were performed in 2015; by 2023, that number had grown to roughly 4.8 million, a nearly doubling that happened to coincide with LeBron's scoring climbing from 25.3 to 28.4 points per game. The confounding variable is almost certainly 'good times and the anxiety they produce.'

What this teaches us, if we are willing to learn it, is that two completely unrelated measurements can move together for reasons that have nothing to do with causation and everything to do with both being passengers on the same larger trends—economic growth, cultural obsession, the relentless quantification of everything. The universe is not laughing at us so much as we are laughing at ourselves while looking in the mirror. We are pattern-seeking creatures trapped in a correlational world.