US population using the internet

As more Americans have gotten online, fewer mail carriers have been bitten by dogs, which is exactly the kind of fact that makes you wonder whether dogs have simply transferred their aggression to the comments section. The correlation is negative and nearly perfect across seven years, suggesting that the internet is either protecting postal workers or replacing the mail they used to carry. The dogs, presumably, are now barking at delivery drones instead.

The mechanism here is pleasingly straightforward, at least compared to most entries on this site. As internet adoption rose through the late 2010s, more Americans shifted their correspondence, bill payments, and package ordering online, which meant USPS carriers made fewer stops and spent less time on residential properties where dogs live. The Postal Service reported that dog bite incidents dropped from about 6,755 in 2016 to roughly 5,300 by 2022, a decline that tracks neatly with the shift from physical mail to digital communication. Fewer letters means fewer encounters, fewer encounters means fewer bites. It is one of the rare cases where the confounding variable—the decline of physical mail—is so obvious it barely qualifies as confounding.

This may be the closest thing on this entire website to an actual causal chain, which makes it almost disappointing from a spurious correlation standpoint. The internet replaced the mail, and the dogs lost their targets. It is elegant, it is logical, and it is almost certainly not the whole story. Nothing involving dogs ever is.