Swimming pool drowning deaths in the US

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it does, that Americans have spent the better part of two decades moving in perfect inverse synchronisation with bananas. As the nation grew less keen on the yellow fruit, drowning deaths in swimming pools climbed with the sort of grim reliability one might expect from something far more predictable than breakfast cereal consumption. One might assume this suggests bananas are performing some sort of aquatic life-saving function we've all been too foolish to notice. They are not.

What we're probably seeing here is population drift and economic behaviour tangling themselves together like headphone cables. Swimming pool ownership and access peaked around the mid-2000s in the US—a post-financial-collapse phenomenon—while per-capita banana consumption fell as people shifted toward other fruits, food trends changed, and yes, broader economic anxieties made casual leisure purchases feel frivolous. A person who would have bought bananas in 2005 might have also been more likely to have a backyard pool; a person in 2021 was doing neither with the same gusto. The number of pools in residential backyards alone declined by roughly 15% between 2006 and 2010, and drowning deaths per 100,000 people fluctuated wildly around 1.1, which is to say roughly one person per million Americans per year.

What this reveals, uncomfortably, is that our hunger for correlation will convince us that two completely unrelated statistics are locked in some sort of cosmic dance—when really they're both just passengers on much larger waves we barely understand. We've spotted something real (the numbers do move together), which makes us feel clever, while missing everything important (why). Perhaps the real lesson is that the more precisely two things correlate, the less you should trust your intuition about what connects them.