US pet insurance policies in forceUS self-published books per year
US self-published books and pet insurance policies in force tracked each other at 0.97 from 2010 to 2021, raising the genuine possibility that every American who published a book about their cat also insured that cat against veterinary misadventure. The self-publishing revolution produced millions of memoirs, thrillers, and indeed books about pets — so the correlation may contain within it a small but statistically pure subset of actual causal overlap. The rest is presumably coincidence, though one hesitates to say this to anyone who has both a manuscript and a rescue greyhound.
US self-published titles grew from around 130,000 in 2010 to over 2 million by the early 2020s, driven by Amazon KDP and other digital publishing platforms lowering barriers to entry. Pet insurance policies grew from roughly 1.4 million in 2012 to over 4.4 million by 2022, driven by rising veterinary costs, pet humanization trends, and younger pet owners' greater willingness to purchase insurance products. Both trends are expressions of the same platform economy and demographic shifts among Millennials: the same cohort that adopted digital publishing tools also treated pets as family members deserving of insurance coverage. They are correlated through a shared demographic and technological moment rather than any direct relationship.
When two industries both explode because the same generation of consumers came of age with different tools and values, the resulting correlation is autobiography masquerading as statistics.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US pet insurance policies in force” vs “US self-published books per year” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
