US life expectancy at birth

It turns out that Americans getting older and Thai beaches getting more crowded are locked in an embrace so tight that a statistician would need a crowbar to separate them. For nine years, as US life expectancy climbed by roughly 2.5 years, Thailand's tourist arrivals rose by about 15 million people, and they did this in perfect synchronisation, like two utterly unrelated dancers who happened to learn the same routine. One wonders what Americans are actually doing in Thailand that is simultaneously extending their lives and destroying their knees.

Thailand's tourist numbers didn't dip in 2020; they fell off a table, dropping by about 83% as borders closed. The US lost roughly 1.8 years of life expectancy in the same year as covid deaths overwhelmed the actuarial tables. Two radically different measurements of the same pandemic — one tracks who couldn't come, the other tracks who didn't get to stay.

What we are really watching is the shadow of a much larger variable—global prosperity, or at least its uneven distribution—moving across two completely separate measurement systems like a lighthouse beam sweeping past two ships in different oceans. This is how the human brain works: it sees movement and assumes connection, which is either our greatest gift or our most useful delusion. Possibly both.