US lottery ticket sales

It turns out that Americans buying lottery tickets and Americans being hit by cars move together with the kind of eerie synchronicity usually reserved for twins separated at birth, which is to say: almost perfectly, and for reasons that remain utterly opaque. One might reasonably expect that hope and death would pull in opposite directions, like a cosmic game of tug-of-war, but the universe apparently finds this funny. Between 2005 and 2022, as more people dreamed of sudden wealth, more people also became sudden statistics, with a correlation of 0.941, which is the sort of number that makes statisticians uncomfortable in a way they rarely admit at parties.

The answer, almost certainly, has nothing to do with lottery tickets cursing their buyers, though I understand why you briefly wondered that. What actually links them is the same thing that links almost everything in a growing economy: more people, more money moving around, more of everything happening faster. The US population grew from about 296 million in 2005 to 338 million by 2022—that's 42 million additional humans making purchases and, separately, crossing streets—while real wages fluctuated, vehicles became heavier and more distracted, and urban development outpaced pedestrian safety infrastructure by a comfortable margin. Economic expansion tends to loosen wallets for discretionary spending (lottery tickets cost about $100 per person annually by 2020) while simultaneously increasing traffic density and vehicle miles traveled, two variables that move together like dance partners who've never discussed the metaphor.

What we're witnessing here is not causation wearing a disguise, but rather two separate human behaviors responding to the same underlying current—the tide of a growing, busier country moving through time and space without particularly caring what we're hoping for. The lottery tickets and the fatalities aren't talking to each other; they're just both responding to the same conductor, which appears to be called 'existence in an expanding economy.' Nothing predicts nothing, as it turns out.