USPS mail carrier dog bite incidents

It is a curious fact, and one that would probably never occur to you unless you worked in statistical pattern recognition, that the more cheese Americans eat per capita, the fewer postal workers get bitten by dogs. One might expect the universe to have better things to do than coordinate these two things so precisely, yet here we are, watching them move together like unhappy dance partners from 2016 to 2022 with a correlation of negative 0.94. The dogs, it seems, are keeping score.

What we are probably watching here is the slow decline of something mundane: the volume of mail itself. Fewer letters in the mailbox means fewer encounters between the mail carrier and the territorial German Shepherd chained to the porch, which means fewer incidents to report. Cheese consumption, meanwhile, has been creeping upward as Americans discovered that eating cheese online was somehow easier than ordering other things online, and as restaurants reopened and closed again in waves, people's dietary choices shifted like sand. Between 2016 and 2022, the USPS handled somewhere in the region of 140 billion fewer pieces of mail, which is roughly equivalent to dropping a letter on every square foot of Rhode Island, and then removing it all again.

The real lesson is that you can make two entirely separate stories about American life tell the same story if you squint hard enough and possess the right data. We are pattern-seeking creatures, and the data obliges us, never quite telling us whether we are discovering truth or simply becoming very good at reading tea leaves. The dogs remain indifferent to both cheese and correlation.