US federal prison population

From 2015 to 2021, US federal prison population and Alibaba Singles Day sales moved in opposite directions with a -0.97 correlation, which one could generously interpret as evidence that e-commerce is an effective crime deterrent, or less generously as two completely unrelated numbers that happened to be assigned adjacent columns in a spreadsheet. Singles Day sales grew from $14 billion in 2015 to over $84 billion by 2021, suggesting that the Chinese consumer economy was booming precisely as the American carceral state was, for once, contracting slightly. Global capitalism contains multitudes.

US federal prison population declined from a peak of around 215,000 in 2013 to roughly 155,000 by 2021, driven by sentencing reforms, the First Step Act of 2018, COVID-19 early release programs, and reduced federal drug prosecutions. Alibaba Singles Day gross merchandise volume grew explosively from 2015 onward, driven by Chinese middle class expansion, mobile commerce adoption, and aggressive marketing. These trends are entirely geographically and causally separate — one reflects US criminal justice policy evolution and the other reflects Chinese e-commerce growth. The seven-year window from 2015 to 2021 captures a particularly steep decline in US federal incarceration and a particularly steep rise in Singles Day, creating an artifactually clean correlation.

A short window, two steep opposing trends from different continents and policy domains, and you get a number that looks like destiny. The window is doing most of the work here.