US health expenditure per capita

It is a curious fact, and one that the universe has seen fit to arrange with what we can only describe as cosmic indifference, that as Americans have grown collectively wealthier and more desperate to extend their lives by microseconds, a man named Jimmy has accumulated subscribers at precisely the same rate, as if health spending and YouTube fame are two manifestations of the same underlying fever. One might expect them to move in opposite directions, or at perpendicular angles, or not at all, but instead they have elected to move together like an elderly couple who have stopped holding hands but somehow still walk in step. The correlation is 0.965, which is to say almost perfect, which is to say almost certainly meaningless.

Here is the slightly embarrassing truth: both metrics are mainly measuring economic growth and digital adoption during a seven-year window of booming internet infrastructure and relative American prosperity. Between 2016 and 2022, Americans were getting simultaneously richer (which they spent on both healthcare and entertainment subscriptions), faster internet was reaching into smaller towns (which meant more people could watch Mr. Beast's eye-watering stunts and also more efficient billing for hospital systems), and YouTube itself was becoming as fundamental to the cultural nervous system as the television was in 1987. A single additional MrBeast subscriber costs essentially nothing but represents an increase in leisure capacity; a single dollar of health spending represents treatment, prevention, aging, and administrative bloat all tangled together in a knot. The real correlation is not between health spending and YouTube fame but between both of them and the expansion of American digital wealth.

What we are witnessing here is the pattern-recognition machinery of the human brain doing what it does best: finding a signal in noise and becoming briefly delighted by its own cleverness. The universe contains no conspiracy, only the quiet arithmetic of two unrelated things that happened to rise together during a boom, in the same way that hat sales and heart disease correlate throughout winter. We will probably see the correlation collapse in 2023 and never think about it again, which is as it should be. Some patterns mean nothing.