US candy and chocolate sales

Here we have two phenomena that should have absolutely nothing to do with one another, yet between 2015 and 2022 they moved together with the kind of synchronicity usually reserved for synchronized swimmers or people who've been married for forty years. One involves the consumption of cocoa-based confections by millions of Americans going about their entirely separate lives. The other involves a man with a peculiar relationship to the letter 'X' broadcasting his thoughts into the void with increasing frequency. They correlation coefficient is 0.951, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous in ways they struggle to articulate.

The actual culprit here is almost certainly the economy, that great invisible hand that apparently also controls chocolate purchases and Twitter availability. Between 2015 and 2022, both US consumer spending and technology adoption surged in tandem—people had more disposable income for candy, and Mr. Musk had more time and presumably more motive to tweet as Tesla stock climbed from roughly 240 dollars to over 900 dollars, making him feel considerably chattier. Population growth added about 20 million Americans to the candy-buying pool, while smartphone penetration reached saturation point, meaning more eyeballs were available to receive his 280-character missives. Seasonal holiday spending, which drives roughly 30 percent of annual chocolate sales, also correlates beautifully with Q4 stock rallies and the general November-December anxiety that makes people reach for both confections and social media.

What emerges from this is not a pattern but a mirror—we are pattern-seeking creatures staring into a universe of noise, occasionally alarmed to find our own faces looking back. The universe contains no shortage of unrelated things moving in the same direction, waiting only for someone with access to a spreadsheet and insufficient weekend plans. Perhaps that's the real correlation: our hunger for meaning and our access to data.