Per capita cheese consumption in the US

Between 2010 and 2021, Americans consumed ever more cheese and published ever more books, which strongly implies that the act of self-publishing requires significant dairy fortification. The r is 0.975, making this one of the more delicious statistical relationships on record. Per capita cheese consumption crept from about 33 to 40 pounds per year, while self-published titles exploded from under a million to several million annually. Presumably authors who write about cheese are responsible for the bulk of both figures.

Both trends reflect the democratization of formerly gatekept industries during the 2010s. Cheese consumption rose steadily as artisanal food culture, restaurant culture, and the general 'foodie' movement normalized premium dairy products. Self-publishing exploded with the maturation of Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, Smashwords, and print-on-demand services, lowering the barrier to authorship to essentially zero. Both are leisure and lifestyle spending categories that expanded as disposable income and consumer confidence recovered post-2009 recession.

Progress democratizes everything at roughly the same pace, whether it is who gets to make cheese or who gets to write a novel. The data cannot tell you which liberation is more important, only that they happened together.