US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

It appears that Americans have spent the last two decades in a state of perfect synchronisation between their desire to stay connected to each other and their desire to consume fermented milk products, as though the universe had decided these two things were basically the same problem. One might imagine a focus group somewhere concluding that what people really wanted was to text their friends while eating yogurt, and then the market simply obliged by making both of these things happen at exactly the same rate. The correlation is 0.96, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians nervous and philosophers deeply tired.

The real story, if there is one, likely involves three decades of the same economic tide lifting all boats that happen to be consumer goods. Both mobile phones and yogurt are products of increasing affluence and changing habits: as real wages climbed unevenly through the 2000s, people bought more phones and switched to yogurt as a convenient protein source, especially as Greek yogurt marketing convinced Americans that fermented dairy was somehow a fitness accessory rather than a breakfast item. There's also a straightforward population-plus-inflation angle—the US population grew from roughly 287 million in 2002 to 333 million by 2022, meaning more people buying more of everything, from SIM cards to single-serve cups. What's striking is the precision of the match: yogurt consumption per capita has risen from about 14 pounds per year to over 20 pounds, while mobile subscriptions have climbed from 48 per 100 people to 115, and they've done this almost as though they'd agreed on a schedule.

So we've discovered that when Americans buy more phones, they buy more yogurt, which tells us almost nothing except that humans are wonderfully committed to finding meaning in the synchronized movements of unrelated industries. The correlation says nothing about causation, obviously—your phone doesn't make you hungry for dairy, and yogurt consumption doesn't drive carrier adoption—but it does confirm that in a wealthy, growing country, consumer goods tend to move in the same direction at roughly the same pace. Which is comforting in its way, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Everything rises together when the tide comes in.