US cheese imports

It is a curious thing that somewhere in the vast machinery of human civilization, the amount of cheese America imports has decided to move in almost perfect synchronization with how many people want to watch a young man give away money on the internet, and one wonders whether the universe is playing a joke on statisticians or whether statisticians have simply become very good at finding jokes the universe never intended. The correlation is 0.966, which is to say these two things are practically twins, separated only by the minor detail that one is a dairy product and the other is a social phenomenon that barely existed when the older twin was born.

The real culprit is almost certainly economic growth and internet penetration rather than any causal link between cheddar consumption and subscriber acquisition, though you do have to admire how plausibly both could be dragged along by rising incomes, younger demographics getting online, and the general expansion of everything in the 2016-to-2022 window. MrBeast's channel grew from roughly 500,000 subscribers to 200 million in that period—a number so stupidly large it's hard to visualize, rather like trying to imagine what it would look like if every person in Australia suddenly wanted to watch someone spend money—while US cheese imports climbed from about 370,000 tons annually to 410,000 tons, a shift modest enough that you'd barely notice it in an actual cheese shop. Both trends sit on the same economic swell, the same technological tailwind, the same demographic curiosity about what happens when you remove friction from attention.

This is what our pattern-recognition brains do when handed any two lines that trend upward at roughly the same time: we squint at them until they look related, which is neither stupid nor wise, just very human. The correlation tells you nothing about causation, obviously, but it does tell you something about how easily complexity can masquerade as connection. Sometimes cheese and YouTube subscribers just rise together into the bewildering future.