US utility patents granted

It appears that American inventors, having exhausted the obvious improvements to mousetraps and sandwich-related devices, began filing patents at precisely the rate that fewer people needed rescuing from swimming pools. One might have expected these two phenomena to ignore each other completely, as one involves the USPTO and the other involves the complete cessation of splashing, but apparently they have been in a committed inverse relationship since 2005. The universe, it seems, does not appreciate being ignored.

What we're probably witnessing here is the ambient hum of American prosperity and paranoia working in opposite directions. As the economy strengthened and technology spending increased (driving patent applications upward), families increasingly invested in pool safety equipment—fencing, alarms, drain covers, that sort of thing—which happened to work. Meanwhile, swimming itself may have shifted from communal public pools, where drowning deaths were more common, to gated residential properties with better supervision. Between 2005 and 2021, utility patents grew from around 157,000 to 258,000 annually, a 65 percent increase, while drowning deaths among children fell by roughly half. It's rather like discovering that the more cleverly we engineer our way out of problems, the fewer people drown, which is either reassuring or deeply suspicious depending on your temperament.

So what we have learned is that swimming pool deaths and patent filings are locked in a relationship so tight it would make a quantum physicist uncomfortable, and yet they almost certainly have nothing to do with each other. This is what happens when you line up enough numbers and step back far enough: the pattern becomes unavoidable, even when the causal logic is somewhere between nonexistent and frankly insulting. Perhaps the real correlation is just that we keep getting better at things.