Vinyl record sales in the US

It appears that between 2005 and 2022, Americans developed a curious habit of dying on the sidewalk in direct proportion to their enthusiasm for listening to music on spinning discs, which is rather like discovering that hat sales correlate perfectly with lightning strikes and wondering whether hats are simply very good at attracting electricity. One might reasonably expect vinyl records and pedestrian fatalities to move through time like two ships that have agreed to ignore each other entirely, yet here they are, moving together with the sort of eerie synchronicity usually reserved for twins separated at birth who both become accountants. Perhaps the universe is simply messing with us.

The real culprit is almost certainly economic recovery and demographic shift. Both vinyl sales and pedestrian deaths ride the waves of broader cultural cycles: more money in pockets means more records bought and more people walking to record stores, more people commuting, more people on streets, more opportunity for cars and pedestrians to have their disagreement about who owns the sidewalk. The period from 2005 to 2022 saw real American GDP grow by roughly 40 percent, which is the sort of number that moves entire ecosystems of human behavior, from the vinyl resurgence among young people (who discovered they could afford records again after 2008) to increased urban density and foot traffic. Meanwhile, distracted driving, smartphone adoption, and aging infrastructure created the conditions for more collisions, while simultaneously the return of the city as a desirable place to live put more vulnerable bodies on streets that were never quite built for this many vulnerable bodies.

What we are witnessing is not the vinyl record secretly causing death, nor death somehow compelling people to buy Fleetwood Mac, but rather two completely different human activities both responding to the same invisible hand of economic and cultural fortune. This is how spurious correlations actually work—not through cosmic conspiracy, but through the simple fact that almost everything in human society is tangled up with almost everything else. We spotted a correlation and immediately felt clever for doing so, which is precisely the point where we should have felt most suspicious.