Robocalls per month in the US

There is something deeply, cosmically wrong with a universe in which Americans' enthusiasm for frozen dairy products moves in perfect inverse proportion to the number of automated voices screaming at them about car warranties. One might expect ice cream consumption to correlate with summer temperatures, or robocalls with the growth of cryptocurrency scams, but instead we find them locked together like two dancers who have never met, moving backwards whenever the other moves forward. It is as if the universe is running a joke specifically designed to confound anyone foolish enough to look for meaning in data.

The most likely culprit is that both trends are being dragged along by something else entirely—probably a combination of economic cycles, population shifts, and the slow grinding transition from landlines to mobile phones. Between 2015 and 2022, disposable income fluctuated with employment rates and wage growth, which would affect both ice cream purchases and the sophistication of telemarketing operations; wealthier people buy more ice cream and are also more worth calling. Meanwhile, the shift toward cellular-only households may have made robocalls slightly less effective even as they increased in volume, while summer vacations and changing leisure patterns could suppress ice cream consumption during years of economic uncertainty. To put the scale in perspective: we're talking about robocalls ranging from roughly 25 billion to 58 billion annually, while per capita ice cream consumption swung between about 20 and 23 pounds per person per year—tiny movements, really, but movements nonetheless.

What we have stumbled upon is less a discovery and more a reminder that any two things that drift slowly over time will eventually find some statistical handhold to grip. The robocalls and ice cream have nothing to do with each other, and yet here they are, 94 percent correlated, moving like old married couples who no longer need to speak. Perhaps the universe is not trying to tell us anything at all.