US commercial casino gambling revenue

It appears that between 2010 and 2023, American casino operators and British publicans entered into what can only be described as a cosmic pact, wherein every time someone in Nevada lost their car keys and their rent money simultaneously, someone in Manchester decided their lager was worth precisely more pence. One wonders if there is a single causal mechanism at work here, or whether the universe simply enjoys watching humans mistake correlation for causation with the dedication of a toddler finding patterns in clouds. The correlation sits at 0.975, which is to say: almost perfect, which is to say: completely impossible, which is to say: probably fine.

What's actually happening here is almost certainly inflation, that great unifying force that makes everything cost more while feeling like nothing has changed at all. Both the US and UK experienced remarkably similar economic cycles during this period—the tail end of post-2008 recovery, gradual wage growth, commodity price fluctuations, and the peculiar stagflation of 2021-2023—and both beer prices and gambling revenues rise reliably when people have slightly more money in their pockets and slightly less faith in its future value. A pint of lager in the UK went from roughly £3.20 to £5.50, an increase of about 70 percent over twelve years; US casino revenue climbed from roughly $26 billion to $43 billion in the same period. It's not that losing money at blackjack causes beer to become expensive, but rather that the same inflationary currents that buoy both industries happen to move in the same direction.

This is what happens when you feed two completely unrelated datasets into a correlation engine and forget to ask whether the thing moving them both is simply time itself, rolling forward with its usual indifference. We are pattern-seeking creatures in a universe drowning in patterns, most of which mean nothing at all. Casino gambling and lager prices move together because the world gets more expensive, and we get older, and we keep looking for reasons why.