The statistics we use to measure global inequality often sound alarming, but do we understand what they actually mean? Are they the best ways of measuring and thinking about global inequality? Or are there better methods out there that deserve more of our attention?
For decades cognitive psychologists used the ‘hot hand fallacy’ as a perfect example of how human intuition can lead people to false beliefs. Meanwhile, the basketball community stubbornly clung onto the idea of streaky shooting. Then two economists discovered a pair of small but crucial errors in the original study that flipped the debate on its head.