Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

It is a curious feature of the universe that as solar panels became cheaper to install on American rooftops, more people drowned in swimming pools, moving together in perfect economic harmony like dance partners who have never met. One might assume these two datasets operate in entirely separate domains—one concerns the price trajectory of photovoltaic cells, the other concerns the tragic miscalculation of human buoyancy—yet for seventeen years they correlate at 0.948, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians weep into their coffee. The universe, it turns out, enjoys a good joke about our need to find meaning in the meaningless.

What's almost certainly happening here is that both variables are riding the same economic wave, though for entirely different reasons. As the US economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and strengthened through 2021, disposable household income increased, which meant more families could afford both residential solar installations and, perhaps more pressingly, swimming pools—those rectangular monuments to middle-class aspiration that require constant maintenance and, apparently, occasional drowning. Population growth over the same period (the US added roughly 30 million people between 2005 and 2021) would push both numbers upward independently; more people means more pools, more solar-curious homeowners, and tragically, more opportunities for drowning. The solar panel price collapse was also driven by manufacturing scale and Chinese production, which followed global economic growth cycles that independently stimulated the home improvement market more broadly.

This is what happens when two entirely unrelated phenomena both respond to the same underlying economic current: they waltz together across seventeen years of data, creating the illusion of causation where none exists. We are pattern-seeking creatures who have built entire civilizations on our ability to spot connections, which is useful for survival but occasionally produces the insight that cheaper solar panels are somehow responsible for swimming pool deaths. Spurious, one might say, was invented for moments like these.