US traffic fatalities

It is a curious fact, and one that most people find it best to ignore, that as Americans have died with increasing regularity on their roads between 2012 and 2022, they have simultaneously rushed to thrift stores to purchase other people's old trousers with nearly perfect mathematical synchronicity. The correlation sits at 0.915, which is the sort of number that makes statisticians weep into their coffee and wonder whether the universe is playing an elaborate prank. One might reasonably expect dead people to have less interest in shopping, but apparently the data suggests otherwise.

The answer, of course, is not that thrift stores are somehow causing traffic fatalities through the sheer gravitational pull of discounted cardigans. What we're almost certainly watching is the combined effect of population growth and economic anxiety working in tandem: more Americans on the roads means more opportunities to collide with one another fatally, while those same economic pressures that kept wages essentially flat throughout this period drove millions toward secondhand shopping as a rational survival strategy. Between 2012 and 2022, the US thrift market grew from roughly 17 billion dollars to nearly 40 billion, a expansion so rapid you could almost hear it happening if you stood in a Goodwill long enough, and this happened precisely as driving fatalities climbed from 33,000 to 42,500 annually—both trendlines following the shape of a country that was simultaneously growing, struggling, and getting behind the wheel in increasing desperation.

So we arrive at the peculiar modern condition wherein two entirely unrelated human activities—dying in traffic and buying secondhand sweaters—have learned to dance together in perfect statistical harmony, which tells us something rather important about pattern-seeking creatures like ourselves. We are, it seems, drawn to correlations the way moths are drawn to porch lights, regardless of whether the light actually leads anywhere useful. The data doesn't care about your story.