US frozen pizza retail sales

It turns out that Americans' willingness to freeze a pizza and their willingness to bind their unpublished manuscript into existence move in almost perfect synchrony, which suggests either that frozen pizza consumption unlocks some dormant creative impulse in the human brain, or that we have simply become very good at finding patterns in the noise of nine data points. One rather suspects the latter, though the former is marginally more interesting.

What we're almost certainly watching here is the ambient economic expansion of the 2010s, that long slow rise in disposable income and Amazon Prime subscriptions that made both convenience food and self-publishing infrastructure cheaper and easier to access. A frozen pizza costs roughly the same as it did in 2010, but your ability to print a book without involving anyone who might say no to you—that became genuinely frictionless around 2011. Both trends also ride the back of broader cultural shifts: more people working from home meant more quick dinners, while simultaneous technological democratization meant more people with a laptop and a novel gathering dust.

The correlation is real enough, the data is perfectly genuine, and yet it tells us almost nothing except that in a large, complex economy, many things tend to trend upward together while conditions permit. This is how humanity works: we notice the frozen pizza and the self-published books moving in lockstep and we feel, briefly, that we have glimpsed something true. We probably haven't, but the feeling persists nonetheless.