Social Science Space

The Global Insights Initiative, with its intriguing acronym of GINI, will bring experimentation to the World Bank’s poverty-fighting efforts by incorporating behavioral and social science into its project design and evaluation.

How an equation cooked up by Mussolini’s numbers guy came to define how we think about inequality—from Occupy Wall Street to the World Bank to the billionaires at Davos—and why it’s time to find a new way of looking at the numbers.