To wit, a short piece from The New York Times Freakonomics blog:

What Do U.S. Oil Production and Mick Jagger Have in Common?

They both peaked in the late 1960’s.

You can infer that, anyway, from this handy chart at the blog OverthinkingIt.

They found a correlation between the decline in U.S. oil production and the decline in the quality of pop music, as measured by Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

It should go without saying that correlation does not prove causation, and there are many caveats to OverthinkingIt’s analysis. But … is the declining quality of pop music primarily a problem of limited reserves, or of inefficient extraction? In other words, is pop music — particularly rock — simply exhausted as a form, leaving today’s musicians with little room for innovation; or have the systems used by popular culture to discover and extract good songs from good musicians just broken down?

Some nice work from the dismal science. But we ain’t skeered. Yet.